Chapter XIII: The Common Enemy

That winter there was one of the most terrible outbreaks of typhoid fever, which had stricken Rory of the Shelties, ever known in St. Mungo’s City. The sickness extended to the suburbs, and sent long arms into the country, reaching to the Aytoun Water, which was so valuable an auxiliary of Drysdale Haugh, creeping up and down its banks in foul malaria, which prostrated alike strong men and weak women, robbed families of their breadwinners, or slew the strapping lads and blooming lasses who were the hope and pride of elderly fathers and mothers.

There was no doubt the first signs of the plague had made their appearance after the excesses and exposure of the Fair week. There had been no spell of short hours and starvation wages to induce such a low state of body and mind as to form a fit foundation for the mischief. But whatever its origin, it soon extended far beyond the defaulters whose deeds had wrought their doom. The fever, after a certain course, appeared to strike impartially the sober, industrious workman, and the idle, dissipated hanger-on for a day’s ‘turn’ to relieve his most pressing wants. The evil rose in the scale of society, and fell upon the well-to-do, scattering sickness and distress among the rich, while naturally its vantage-ground was the quarters of the poor. It clove to them as to its fitting haunts, and, like a cowardly assailant, did deadliest injury where there was least power of resistance.

It was a busy time for Dr. Peter and Athole Murray, who acted from the first as her father’s indefatigable assistant, feeling no fear to go on the call of duty where he went with his life in his hand, day and night.

Auld Tam took the greatest interest in the nature of the outbreak, and showed not the slightest shrinking from a contact with which, indeed, he had been familiar in his early days. It was a mortification to him to discover that his best cottages were not spared; but he fell back on the comfort that there the remedies were applied with the least difficulty and the greatest average of success.

But the tug of war came when the epidemic raged so fiercely in the worst Glasgow slums that it roused an apathetic public. Tam Drysdale was not the man to stand and gape and groan or merely moralize or sermonize over the calamity, far less was he the heartless egotist who would employ his resources to flee from the foe, leaving a helpless multitude in its clutches. He was ready to fight it hand to hand, as he had fought all the early obstacles in his career. He was not only foremost in appointing and attending meetings of men in high enough places to cope with sanitary mischief; but when a house-to-house visitation was started, he, who might have pleaded that his interests were at Drysdale Haugh, was one of the first to put down his name as a visitor in the darkest places of the city. His strong firm step was the readiest to enter the infected dwellings, where there was not a breath of air that was not heavy with poison. He was known to pull off his coat, on an emergency, and carry a patient--a man mad with delirium, whom it would have required two ordinary men to master--on his back from one room to another; and where he found none save exhausted, half-distracted women to watch the sick, he sometimes sent the watchers to bed, and took their vigil till some other good Samaritan relieved him in turn.

Every morning the two Eppies--not to be deceived, knowing too well the expeditions on which auld Tam was bent--clung to him at parting with prayers and tears. He put the woman and the girl gently from him, and went his way; and on his return, for the first time in his life, he would not permit them to hang about him till he had passed through such processes of bathing and changing his clothes as should ensure his wife and daughter’s safety. His obduracy would have half-broken their hearts if the stayers at home had not been encouraged to be as busy as bees in Tam’s absence, concocting such stores of jellies and soups, and manufacturing such loads of sick-room clothes, as not the most accomplished cook and housekeeper in the world could have achieved single-handed--even if she had condescended to employ her talents day after day--not for the dining-room or the linen-presses at Drysdale Hall, but for afflicted sections of the Gallowgate and the Sautmarket.

The strait was so great that everybody with time and means and a heart to feel was called into requisition. Neither did Claribel Drysdale refuse to obey the call, but she worked in the ranks of Lady Semple, to whom she was an available auxiliary, while the two Eppies were sufficient for themselves at home.

The first thing that staggered Tam Drysdale was stumbling on his son Tam engaged in the same work as himself. The father’s hale colour sensibly paled, and a troubled look came into his eyes.

‘What are you seeking here, Tam?’ he asked almost roughly. ‘This is not a place for a student fellow like you. You are not used to the ways of the poor folk; you’ll only add to the trouble if you come to grief; you can do no possible good. Go home to your books, but take care you do not come near your mother and sisters in that coat and these breeks.’

Young Tam looked his father more fully in the face than he had done for some time, with more of an answering challenge in the brown eyes which were so like his mother’s in tint, and yet had his father’s determined glance. There was no sullenness in Tam’s face at this moment--rather a sense of grim amusement and something that might have stood for fellow-feeling.

‘I’m not such a mere bookworm as you think me, sir. How should I not know the ways of the working people, among whom I have dwelt all my life? I’ll not come to grief any more than you will. What are _you_ seeking here, may I ask, father?’

‘Don’t talk nonsense, Tam,’ said his father testily; ‘you know it is my place, as the maister of a public work, to see into the condition of the people, both here and at Drysdale Haugh, on an occasion like the present. Forbye, I am familiar with the situation. I mind the last bad outbreak of the fivver. It was when I was in my ‘prenticeship and staying with my uncle Geordie. There were five in the hoose laid down with it. My cousin Nancy deed, poor lass! and there was nobody to look after Sandy during the night, and keep him from louping over the windy, but me. I had a regular training to such scenes.’

Young Tam hesitated for a moment.

‘I have not quite understood hitherto what duties a master’s position is supposed to include,’ he said at last, a little stiffly; ‘but if I am ever to undertake them, I should say my training had better begin.’

Auld Tam’s whole aspect brightened indescribably.

‘Plenty of time for that,’ he said gruffly, but heartily, ‘and your experience should come by degrees, Tam, not in a dunt [sudden blow], as it comes to working lads bred hardily as I was, and called to face the best and the worst all round from the beginning. It is not easy, but it is in the day’s work--part of their lives. Besides, they say,’ added Tam hastily, ‘the fivver is more catching for the young than for the auld.’

‘You’re not old,’ said young Tam hastily, with a quick sharp denial that sent a glow through his progenitor’s veins. ‘You are hardly middle-aged. People should call stages of existence by their right names.’

‘Anyway, I’m auld Tam when you are to the fore,’ said his father, much as he would have spoken to his daughter Eppie, ‘and it is richt the young should be spared to take the place of the auld.’

‘It is nothing of the kind,’ answered young Tam doggedly. ‘Take your place! very likely. I wonder which would be most missed. You know very well, father, you could ill be spared. You ought not to run risks like these, while it does not matter for a fellow like me.’

‘Lad, you are tempting the Almichty!’ cried Tam almost fiercely; ‘are you so left to yoursel’ as to think you could well be spared by your mither--and me?’ he ended with a gulp of the words, and a grip as of iron of young Tam’s shoulder. ‘But it is all nonsense!’ he said, putting force upon himself the next moment. ‘We’ve got a trick of disagreeing; that is what it is.’

‘And I am afraid there is little prospect of our doing anything else, if the alternative is my keeping out of Glasgow, and your going on as you have been doing for the last ten days,’ retorted young Tam, defying his father openly.

And auld Tam gave in with the moisture in his eyes, and his hand still on his son’s shoulder.

‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘have it your own way, laddie; you’ve always been as kittle [ticklish] to deal with as a woman, Tam--far worse than your sisters. But if we sail in the same boat for once, it will be some sma’ comfort.’

The sailing in the same boat through a crisis of life and death meant from this moment a certain alteration of tone between father and son--a certain fraternization--temporary, and only on one point as yet, but never entirely lost sight of in their subsequent differences, when young Tam was born to object, and auld Tam hated to be contradicted. For one thing, they saw a good deal of each other during the next week or two--more than they had seen since young Tam was a schoolboy. For another, it was understood between them that there was a probability of auld Tam’s gaining the desire of his heart, by his son’s becoming, under whatever variety of opinion, his father’s partner and successor.

Some of the fever cases in Glasgow were of the most virulent kind. Occasionally they assumed the form of the worst sewer-poisoning, from which there was hardly a chance of escape. The inspector of nuisances had neglected his duty. A man and wife--a helpless, handless, poverty-stricken, though honest and sober couple--had been suffered to live, with a large family, in a house which was not fit for a pigsty. First one child sickened, and then another, and died in the briefest interval of time, so that four little bodies were carried away in one hearse, and the expense even of a combined funeral threatened to add starvation to the other pangs of the living. The skin of the last child attacked took green and livid hues before the breath went out of his body.

Auld Tam bent his brows sternly, and swore it was social murder. He half conceived the idea, if he lived and continued to prosper, of doing something more than found a family, and bring Drysdale Haugh to perfection--something to atone for the neglect by the better endowed and better informed of the less qualified and more ignorant--something in which young Tam might be with him heart and soul, till Glasgow should speak of the father and son, as, indeed, they were speaking of them at this moment, though auld Tam paid no heed to it.

The fever, as it raged, was turning up in the more respectable quarters, in the old squares and streets, where the houses were good and spacious, but the drains had been little thought of, and the sun seldom shone.

Young Tam Drysdale saw his father at the office one afternoon, and remarked with consternation that he looked as if he had received a shock to his whole system--at the same time he was deliberately delaying the ordinary hour of his return to Drysdale Hall. He pooh-poohed the idea of anything wrong with him physically, or of rest being desirable, at the very moment that he was moving about in a perturbed manner, showing signs of trouble and perplexity in every line of his usually strong, sagacious face.

‘Shut the door, Tam; I do not want those fellies out there to catch a sough [murmur] of what I have got to say. Yes, I have come across something that has grieved me. Grieved is not the word. Gude Lord! it is enough to shake a man’s faith in the established order of things. What would your mither think? Her that was wont to stand in fear and trembling before such gentlefolks. But, there, she said, only the other day, that it was a mystery we should be so weel aff in the world’s gudes, and others as gude--maybe a hantle better (she’s a humble lass, your mither)--brought to want what they had been bred to from their cradles. Well, well, it comes to this, I had speech with one of the doctors, and he mentioned there were cases of fever in St. Mungo’s Square.’

‘So I heard,’ said young Tam.

‘One of them was an auld Miss Mackinnon, and as I’m a living man, Tam, he added that he did not believe the leddies had enough to eat, though they put the best face on it to him; and it was a delicate matter to propose to get parish or any other relief for them. The Lord preserve us! the auld Mackinnons--Gavin Mackinnon’s aunties, come of the Virginian Mackinnons--to be in want of food, very likely of clothing! Is the end of the world come upon us? I mind of them being about Drysdale Hall when their nephew had it--no very weel-faured [handsome], but gallant, portly, gabby [talkative] leddies, as they had a gude title to be, since they were real edicate leddies for generations back--none of your upstarts that do not know their finger from their thoomb, while they wear silks and velvets. I mind ane of them cracked [talked] like a pen-gun--on things she did not ken muckle about, I must confess, but she had the gift of conversation for a’ that; and another--an aulder woman than mother is now--played the pianny better than Clary can do, at a dance and supper that Mackinnon gave the men before trips down the water were the order of the day; and now to say that the auld leddies have come to want--Tam, it’s seeckening!’

Young Tam had not his father’s keen susceptibilities where real ladies and gentlemen were concerned. His mind went off on another tack.

‘They must be relations of Mackinnon who stays so often at Semple Barns. Why does he not look after his people? I suppose you would call him a real gentleman?’ suggested Tam, somewhat sardonically.

‘It is a burning shame to him!’ auld Tam swore stoutly, ‘though a young offisher has not much to spare. Maybe the lad does help them, and they are ill managers, as these gentry often are. But that is neither here nor there. Something must be done, I could not sleep in my bed with such a burden on my mind; and if your mither were to hear of it, she would not break bread for the next twal’ hours. I want you to come along and call with me, Tam. We can pass ourselves off as sent on an inspection among great and small throughout the town. The leddies cannot be going much about to hear the story contradicted. We can see and judge for ourselves. And it may be possible to put in a word about the superiority of country provisions, and whether the Miss Mackinnons would do me the honour to accept a specimen of meat and dairy produce and vegetables and fruit from Drysdale Hall. I think it might be managed in that way, and the favour could be repeated. I have been turning over in my mind whether I could not get up an auld debt to Gauvin Mackinnon, but sic a lee would stick in my throat; then the young lad Mackinnon might interfere, and detection would be awkward.’

‘Upon my word, father, I never knew you were so accomplished a deceiver,’ said young Tam, grave as he was, unable to keep from laughter. ‘I never thought to pay visits with you under false pretences.’

‘Do not gibe, Tam,’ said his father, as solemnly as he would have rebuked a jest at a death-bed. ‘This is not a subject for gibing. You heard what the doctor said--it is a most delicate matter to ask leddies to take anything save a parcel of idle compliments from you. If stratagems are ever allowable, it must be here.’

Indeed, death was very near, in more shapes than one, to the old stripped house in St. Mungo’s Square. It was Miss Bethia, the youngest and the most able-bodied sister who had been smitten, and when she was ‘sooming [swimming] for her life,’ as Miss Janet admitted brokenly, the chief source of livelihood for the other sisters was withdrawn from them. The moment the disease had declared itself, Miss Janet had written to her grand-nephew, forbidding him to come near the house on account of the infection. He broke through the prohibition, but he never got beyond the front-door, where Miss Janet consented to parley with him, solely on condition that he held his handkerchief to his mouth and did not cross the door-step.

Such aid as the Lieutenant sent consisted of trifling delicacies, while, alas! there was dismal lack of the commonest necessaries.

While Miss Bethia was at the worst, it seemed that her sisters needed little more food than sufficed for the sick-room. They lived upon their anxiety--hope and fear acted as stimulants to them. It was when the patient had got the turn, and required more nourishment than milk and beef-tea, that the exhausted state of Miss Janet and Miss Mackinnon began to show itself plainly. But as people can grow accustomed to abstinence up to a certain point, and cease to feel the cravings of appetite, after they have failed by degrees to be appeased in anything save the most partial and perfunctory manner, so the feeble, shaky, but still dauntless scarecrow, Miss Janet, preserved an attitude of heroic stoicism throughout her interview with the two Drysdales.

Miss Janet had two motives to nerve her to endure to the end. She had never quite forgiven Tam Drysdale for having succeeded her late nephew at Drysdale Haugh; therefore he was the last man in Glasgow to whom she would have consented to be beholden in the direst extremity. It made no difference that the grudge was groundless and utterly unreasonable. That was one link in the argument; another, and still stronger, turned on the fact that if she ever consented to waive her displeasure and accept the overtures of the Drysdales, it must be, as before, on the plea of a marriage, and she was not going to spoil Eneas’s chances by betraying the poverty of the land in St. Mungo’s Square. No; there were still some potatoes and oatmeal in the larder, and Miss Janet felt as independent as Andrew Marvel with his mutton-bone.

Miss Bethia might have behaved differently, when she lay on her bed, weakly crying, with the stirrings of new life in her, and the promptings of a child’s fresh hunger, never satisfied; but she would have been the first to feel ashamed of her infirmity when strength was restored to her.

Tam Drysdale was nearer to breaking down in his manliness than he had been in the whole course of his life, when he sat in the bare wreck of a room, without a fire, on the chill autumn day, waiting for the appearance of one of the ladies. He kept muttering, half under his breath, ‘Gude Lord, Tam!’ and, ‘Have the leddies come to this?’ He ‘thought shame’ when he recalled the prized grandeur and substantial comforts and luxuries of Drysdale Hall. He rubbed his forehead, and screwed up his courage for the carrying out of his mission.

When Miss Janet entered, Tam’s heart was wrung anew. He would never have known his old acquaintance--the gallant, portly lady of the past--in the fallen away, haggard woman in the old-fashioned garments, that looked so much too wide, they appeared to flap about the big-boned figure; only the remembered ‘gabbiness’ of the lady remained as a present trait. For if Miss Janet did not receive her late nephew’s former servant with ‘becks and bows and wreathed smiles,’ she treated him and his son with a kind of brow-beating condescension. She made her explanations with wonderfully little cutting short of her long tongue, considering the small amount of fuel in the form of nourishment it and the rest of her bodily powers had to work upon. But the voice was at once weaker and shriller in what _timbre_ it possessed, and a little faltering occasionally, while a tremulous movement passed from time to time over the hard-favoured features; and the worn hands, which she had not been sufficiently mistress of herself to encase in gloves, shook beyond the power of control as they lay in her lap.

Miss Janet said she and her elder sister had been sitting in poor Betheye’s room, and had dispensed with a fire elsewhere. Betheye was doing very well now. Oh yes! she had every advantage--a good doctor, and her grand-nephew the Lieutenant was constantly sending fruit, and what not. They--the Miss Mackinnons--felt for the poor sufferers from the sickness. It was quite right a fund should be raised for them. She would look about, when she had time, and see if she could find any odds and ends that might be useful. She spoke as if she and hers were as far removed as the Drysdales themselves from the deprivations and dependence of poverty.

Young Tam had never seen his father so deferential as to this ‘genteel, half-crazy object of charity,’ the younger man was guilty of calling poor Miss Janet. It was with absolute trepidation and a doubly-respectful ‘Miss Mackinnon, mem,’ that auld Tam delivered the sentence he had laboriously composed of the excellent unadulterated character of all articles of food in the country, and the comfort to be derived from availing one’s self of them in an unhealthy season. This was the prelude to a petition that Miss Janet would permit him to send her ‘a basket from Drysdale Haugh which might remind her of “auld lang syne.”’

Perhaps the reference was not very happy; anyhow, Miss Janet gave a quavering laugh, and told him she was greatly obliged, but he must not trouble himself. The town and the country were brought so near now, they were equally well supplied with victuals of every description; she and her sisters had all they could wish. She did not think even the Strathdivie curds and cream, new-laid eggs, and stubble chickens could taste better than what could be found in Buchanan Street. She remembered hearing that her grandfather would always have fowls from Strathdivie when he wanted cockie-leekie or hen-broth, but farm troke [goods] were rife everywhere now. She would offer the gentlemen wine (there was only a thimbleful in Miss Bethia’s room), but she understood from her grand-nephew that it was not the fashion now to taste anything after luncheon; so Miss Janet, with flying colours, dismissed the intruders. Neither father nor son was in the least degree deceived, and young Tam, at this stage, felt as little inclined to gibe as his father.

‘The puir leddy is reduced to skin and bane,’ said auld Tam, with a groan. ‘I do not believe she has had butcher meat, or any other support than a bit bread and a blash [watery mixture] of tea, for a month. If we do not get the better of her quickly, she’ll be past the reach of mortal man. And there are three of them--one just out of the fivver--in the same plight. Gude Lord! something must be done. Shall we drive to the Barracks and break the story to that careless puppy of an offisher? It is for him to interfere, and not suffer his aunties, who brought him up, to perish, though he has to force meat and drink down their craigs [throats].’

Certainly, if no other resource could be hit upon, Eneas Mackinnon must be appealed to, however painful the appeal to both parties.

But young Tam had another idea which might obviate the disagreeable step, for the present at least.

‘The Mackinnons and Murrays were old acquaintances when Gavin Mackinnon and Dr. Peter’s father were partners. Send in Dr. Peter to see the ladies, as a piece of attention from an old friend. That will save them the expense of further medical attendance, if it does nothing else, and he will make his observation and deliver his report.’

Auld Tam was only too thankful to take his son’s advice, and secure another coadjutor in the ticklish business.