Chapter XXXI: The Suspicion Becomes a Certainty

Auld Tam had not the right to a single one of the advantages on which he had prided himself. Nothing was his--neither lands nor works, neither old farmhouse nor modern mansion, nor office in Glasgow--at least, if any portion of what he had called his remained to him, the claim was so entangled, and so met and barred by other claims, that he could not unravel it.

The Mackinnons had sold, without a right, land and works. Tam had bought equally without a warrant. He would be entitled to his purchase-money back again, he supposed, if there was a grain of justice in men’s laws; but that would be little in comparison to the rents and shares of profits he might be called on to refund, and the sums of money he had expended on buildings and improvements which he had made on another man’s property without his consent, for which there was no reason that he should have compensation. If the miserable discovery had been made in other circumstances, there was just a chance that he might have surmounted it. He might have compounded for wrong done--without any evil intention on his part--in which as it had happened he had been the most cruelly wronged, and continued his business an impoverished but not a ruined man. It was otherwise this year, when, as he had known, he had need of not only all his available capital, but his unimpaired credit, to carry him through the pressure occasioned by extravagant outlay and over-trading, when there were dropping shots of failures on every side, like minute-guns at sea, gathering gloom on the Exchange, a glutted market, forced sales, short hours, improvident work-people beginning to starve without the apology of a strike, stinted indulgences, forbidden pleasures, haggard faces, heavy hearts, care and doubt, and dread for what was coming on all hands.

This was the reverse side of that splendid prosperity of which in its intoxication men had said, raving, that it would never come to an end; and Tam, who had seen both sides more than once before, had raved like the rest, with the least excuse, because he had boasted he had known all the turns of trade. He had been as blind and besotted as any tyro in commerce--blinder at the last than his own son Tam, who was new to the business. He had over-speculated and risked the most daring ventures, and he would have wanted all the help of a secure position and untrammelled reserves of power to bring the past year’s undertakings to a successful issue--to prevent them, like Pharaoh’s lean cattle, swallowing up their well-fleshed brethren--nay, so to control and compel them as to make them the instruments of the further building up of his fortunes, in spite of formidable odds, and of the extension and preservation of his name for deep sagacity and broadly-calculated enterprise.

Auld Tam had still hoped this with a high heart till his conversation with Mr. Greig in his office. What had been a faintly appalling suspicion then, was now a crushing reality; and he knew that to confess it publicly, as he was bound to do, and make restitution of what he had unawares acquired without the title to do so, meant simply, under present circumstances, dire ruin, without the hope of retrieving his losses. He could hardly even escape moral blame. Men might indeed free him from having been knowingly a party to the illegal transfer of Drysdale Haugh, which had rebounded so heavily on his own head; but they would not fail to accuse him of over-confidence and carelessness, and as ‘give a dog a bad name and hang him,’ so they would count as little less than criminal the magnitude of those far-afield speculations which had, as it proved, been raised on a foundation of sand, and not of rock. It would not matter--for the world never stopped to make such reservations--that he had been as ignorant of the instability of his foundation when he incurred these obligations, as the humblest bleacher or printer in his employment. Men would look at the whole story as giving the lie to the testimony by which they had united in calling him a prince and a ruler in trade, and had learned to put unbounded faith in his probity, his judgment, his discretion.

Tam Drysdale would be ruined without remedy, and he would ruin many another in his fall--from large firms, linked inseparably with his, to small contractors who had been his early comrades, like Willie Coates.

Auld Tam grew dizzy as he contemplated the catastrophe, and tried to take in all the consequences. Then he said he would sleep upon it, since it was a thing that no man could take action upon at a moment’s notice. He replaced the papers in his desk, dropping them as if the fingers which could no longer retain them were palsied, locked them up, unfastened his room door, and walked out, feeling for the first time in his life that he had been up too early, had been in Glasgow at work all day, and was not so young as he had been. He said as much when he joined his family in the drawing-room; and his Eppie, glancing up quickly in his face, noticed, with a sharp pain, that her Tam looked ten years older since morning. His comely, fresh-coloured face was grey and lined, his eyes seemed sunken, the very carriage of his head was altered. Could it be the beginning of a sudden ‘breaking-up’ of his manly frame? She had heard of such unexpected, untimely breakings-up, specially in men of active habits, who had done as great things for themselves and their families as Tam Drysdale had done. It would break her heart for his sake; but if he were to become prematurely aged and infirm, if waiting upon him on her ‘bended knees,’ if nursing him every hour of the twenty-four, if studying every sick man’s idle peevish fancy could solace him, he should have the solace--she would do it for her goodman, the lover of her youth, the father of her bairns, with her last breath, and it would be the greatest comfort left to her.

After auld Tam’s admission of fatigue, it was natural that he should sit and rest in his chair, while young Eppie sang softly to him. Her mother wished she had not chosen ‘The Land o’ the Leal’ for her first song; indeed, Tam himself interposed as if he could not bear it, saying,

‘Not that, bairn; can you not give us something less dowie [sad]?’

But when Eppie gave him ‘Tak’ your auld cloak about you,’ he failed to beat time to the tune.

Tam supped composedly, to all outward appearance, but privately he felt as if he were swallowing, not to say borrowed, but stolen food, every morsel of which threatened to choke him. He lay awake during the long night, hearing every hour strike on the numerous clocks and timepieces which were no longer his any more than the bed he was stretched upon. It had been a whim of his to furnish every room with a timepiece, and to make it his business to see that the time in each case was told accurately. Now, every clock of them all combined to say that his days at Drysdale Hall were numbered, that still briefer was the space before he must tell his wife and children the great reverse which had befallen them. He had seemed sufficient for them in past years, but after all he had made a mess of both his own life and theirs. He had brought them up for a station which they were not called upon to fill; he had disqualified them from being ordinary working men and women, and he greatly feared that he could do little or nothing to atone for the injury he had inflicted where he had meant to confer the greatest benefit. He had been forgetful in his prosperity that he was growing more than middle-aged, and all these tokens of time in the rooms, which were beating and ticking and striking around him, seemed only there to remind him that the afternoon shadows had fallen across his path, and that though he would gladly employ what was left of it in toiling to make another business, and earn a fresh fortune for his children to spend, soon little more than the evening of life would remain to him. He could not bring back the past and live again the young, strong life, in which hardship and self-denial and work which might have tried a horse were burdens easy to carry, in the light of the confidence which had never been dashed and the hope that had known no disappointment.

All the time Eppie was lying ‘waukrife’ (wakeful) by his side, not stirring an inch, hardly daring to breathe, in case she should waft away that downy sleep of which she was persuaded her husband stood greatly in need. She only took it upon her to remonstrate--in vain, though she was at the same time slightly reassured by his making the exertion and by the determination with which he persisted in it--when he would rise betimes, even earlier than his usual hour.

It was a fine September morning, and Tam strolled out upon the terrace, before breakfast, and looked about him. Yonder lay his bleach-fields, with the dew glittering upon the whiteness, into which all the rainbow colours were merged at this distance. The inhabitants of the thriving village, the roofs of which were just visible beyond the tree-tops of Barley Riggs, were dependent upon these fields and the adjoining works for their daily bread. How would it fare with them when his rule was at an end? Would the long ‘offisher lad’ Mackinnon, with the drawling tongue and the indifferent manner, into whose hands Drysdale Haugh must fall, make anything of it--make more of it than his father had made? What chance was there? Not the most distant.

What retribution was this that had come upon him, Tam Drysdale? He had never willingly wronged a Mackinnon of them; for that matter he had never, with his knowledge and by his consent, injured any human being. He had sought all his life to help his neighbours as he had helped himself. He had exerted himself to save the old Miss Mackinnons from starvation, which their precious grand-nephew had been too supercilious a puppy so much as to conceive of, and present a sufficient shield between the women who had reared him and a beggar’s death. Auld Tam had interposed a second time to deliver the ladies from the consequences of their trespass against the law of the land, and had striven his hardest to rescue them, else they might have been transported beyond the seas at this day, grey-headed gentlewomen though they were, without their cipher of a gentleman nephew being able to help it.

And what had been Tam Drysdale’s reward? That he had planned and laboured and built and improved, for Guy Mackinnon’s son to enter upon Tam’s labours, and reap the fruits of the harvest his father had wasted and sold for his ease and pleasure--as much as ever Esau had sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right? Yet He had allowed the legality of Esau’s deed, while He was going to annul Gavin Mackinnon’s. The God of Bethel had upheld Jacob after he had sought to clinch his bargain by a barefaced deception, practised on a blind old man--his own father; but He would forsake Tam Drysdale. Tam was at the bottom of his heart a sincerely religious man; but, as often happens, in the great trial of his life his faith was assailed by such violent gusts of doubt and despair as threatened to tear the plant up by the roots, and leave it to wither and be burnt like any worthless weed of accident and habit.

Near at hand the early morning sun was glinting on the ivy, shrouding the bit of the building which had belonged to the old farmhouse--the dwelling of that earlier Drysdale against whom Tam had hitherto borne no grudge for transferring his property through Beenie Pryde and Maggie Craig to the Mackinnons. Tam had considered that the man had a right to do what he liked with his own, and that Tam’s unfortunate father had justly forfeited any claim of kinship. On the whole, Tam had preferred that he should win back what had belonged to his progenitors by his individual industry and ability, so that it might be doubly his. But now, he felt as if his father’s cousin had been in a conspiracy to betray him to the Mackinnons, to enable them not only to get their own out of him, but to serve themselves for long years after he had ceased to be their servant with his sinews and brains--to end by robbing him of his best, under no plea except that he had taken what they had not prized, what they had actually tendered for his acceptance, without the right to do so.

On this side of the terrace were the offices and gardens on which their master had bestowed such pains, where his beasts were lodged like Christians, and his flowers were the finest in the west-country--for Eneas Mackinnon to boast of. Great beds of gorgeous autumn dahlias, and tall hollyhocks, untouched as yet by frost, had been so arranged that the gazer from the terrace could catch a glimpse of their wealth of size and colour, and Tam, walking there only yesterday morning, had wondered if the hanging gardens of Damascus had held anything more stately and splendid.

As auld Tam looked, young Eppie came tripping out in her fresh morning-gown, calling upon her father to praise her for her early rising, asking if he would not go with her to the orchid-house, which he had not seen since Neil had done stocking it; and did he know Neil said the dwarf apricot and peach trees, which he had kept back and was now to put under glass, would provide the table with peaches and apricots all the winter, and that the silver sand and peat mould had answered so well with the rhododendrons, next spring the heads would be as big as cabbages. Did he think it could be true that he would beat Lady Semple and everybody at the next year’s flower-shows?

Auld Tam was restless to set off to Glasgow to his office, though he had a sense beforehand that there, as here, not only would the glory be departed, he would look at everything with the eyes of a doomed man. He would feel like the dying man on whom the irrevocable sentence has passed, that within a period longer or shorter, measured in this instance by a refinement of torture with his own hand, he must go forth and be no longer seen, while the place which had known him, where he had been happy and honoured, would know him no more.

Tam wondered, as he drove through the streets, who would miss him, and for how long they would speak of his rise and fall, as he had heard other histories spoken of, half as an encouragement, half as a warning. He passed into his office, the brass plate on the door bearing ‘Messrs. Thomas Drysdale & Son’ still showing the last two words freshly cut in the metal. He received the usual respectful greetings as if he were in some sort a stranger there already, though nobody else knew it--as if the greetings were not intended for him, but for another person, so that there was a species of mockery in his accepting them.

Still, auld Tam was strong enough to make no sign which anyone save a woman like Eppie the elder, with the intuition of love and the nearness to the object of her scrutiny which she commanded, could have detected. Even young Tam was not aware that there was anything amiss with his father. More than once, as the hours passed by, the younger man admired the acuteness of perception and the grasp both of present details and future results which the head of the firm showed in negotiating sundry extensive transactions that came in the course of the day’s work. For, fairly launched in the full swing of his engagements, Tam rid himself of every paralyzing abstraction that had seized hold of him, and was, if anything, more alert and earnest in business than ever, as if the prosperity of Drysdale and Son depended upon how he discharged his customary duties.

According to what was no infrequent occurrence in auld Tam’s experience, appeals were made to him on behalf of others engaged in the same business, and where the interests of trade in general and of some of the municipal affairs of the city were concerned. He was asked to pronounce on the dealings of strangers, to give his opinion on clashing theories; he was invited to take an active part in one of the political questions which was reckoned of vital moment to the welfare of his townsmen, and never had the decisions, which were listened to with such flattering attention, struck the hearers as shrewder, sounder, more unbiased, more worthy of the man.

That day’s programme was a sample of many such programmes, for still auld Tam put off taking action on the discovery he had made. As he had said to himself that it was not a step to take on the spur of the moment, he went on to say it was not a step to take on a week or a month’s notice. A man must have time to set his house in order--such a great house as Tam had reared and was about to pull down--to think and plan if nothing could be done to render the overthrow less complete, to seek the first legal advice in the country, as Tam had been prone to do in matters of much less moment, and ascertain if there were no honourable way out of the labyrinth. Yet all the time Tam sickened at the thought of law and lawyers, and he did not believe that there could be any loophole for escape. His common-sense, stimulated by the hints Mr. Greig had given him, convinced the proprietor of Drysdale Haugh that marriage contracts, about which he had thought so little, must be made for the most part in the interest of the children of the contracting parties, to preserve to them their inheritance, and that no tampering with such legal obligations could be permitted.

Thus, though Tam told himself that he was waiting to consult the foremost lawyers, the consultation too was deferred until all at once he began to ask himself, with a certain fierceness in the question, whether he were called upon to sacrifice himself and all he held dear. His Eppie, young Tam, and the rest; his earnings, his reputation, his trade; ‘these sheep’ over at the works, who would suffer in a hundred ways from being consigned to incapable hands--all to undo the consequences of a negligence to which Tam could not deny that he had been a party, but with regard to which he had certainly been the least guilty. If he obeyed the dictates of a scrupulous conscience, a gross injustice would be committed. The child of the principal offender, who could never have missed what he had never possessed or dreamt of possessing, and would not know what to do with if it were laid at his feet, would reap a huge profit from the wrong done by his father and mother against him and his neighbour.

After Tam had landed himself in this moral quagmire, a new torment beset him. He was haunted by the presence of Sandy Macnab, the dog-man at Semple Barns. Go where Tam liked, in the streets of Glasgow, on the country roads near Drysdale Hall and Semple Barns, Sandy Macnab was constantly turning up promiscuously very much in the fashion of a fatality. Of course Tam, in his distempered frame of mind, was liable to exaggerate the accident; nevertheless it existed. Naturally the sight of Sandy, with the recollections it conjured up, was not from the first agreeable to Tam. As time progressed, and the workings of his mind had reached a certain stage, they began, in spite of him, to present the strapping, easy-minded, thick-skinned Highlander in the light of an accomplice forced upon Tam’s notice. Before long the merest glimpse of the muscular figure, with the erect, almost martial, gait and elastic step, the swarthy complexion, the roving eye, the fluttering tartans, became perfectly detestable to the person who had once been full of a fine serenity, but was fast growing fidgety, testy, and disposed to consider himself impertinently intruded upon.

Rather inexplicably, Sandy, who could not be depended upon for fine feelings, had shown, to begin with, considerable sympathy with auld Tam’s aversion to encountering him. Sandy, too, had given signs of trouble at the persistent luck by which he came across the master of Drysdale Hall in these recent days. It boded no good to either--according to the Highlander’s superstitious fancies. To be always running up against a gentleman was a token that you and he had something more than either of you guessed, perhaps, to do with each other--something in common to answer for, it might be; and if so, that retribution was already dogging your steps.

So Sandy also had practised looking another way and making a pretence of not seeing his master’s friend. But this becoming shyness and reserve had not lasted for any length of time. After a short interval Sandy Macnab rather sought to attract Tam’s attention, and made various overtures to speak with him--not without a hateful mysteriousness that defeated its object. Tam resisted indignantly. He was not sunk to this, that he should have Sandy Macnab for his confidant, and live at his mercy. Far better let the man tell the little he knew in whatever quarter he liked, and anticipate the announcement which auld Tam was never sure that he might not make any day. He only questioned its righteousness with a sore questioning, and waited till he could satisfy himself of its propriety; but he would take no blackguard precautions to conceal the contract which had come by no act of his into his hands, which he might have destroyed the moment he understood its real bearing, and nobody been any wiser. It would have been time enough then to make terms with a groom and dog-man, a forward, swaggering hanger-on of the gentry; a thick-sculled whelp like Sandy Macnab. But instead, the paper lay, safe and untampered with, in the desk in Tam’s business-room, ready for him to produce any day, and to pass on, as he had meant on receiving it, to ‘the offisher lad Mackinnon.’

After the casual encounters had come to have the air of Sandy Macnab’s being regularly on the outlook for Tam, though the Highlander’s general deportment was not so much insolently aggressive as shamefacedly anxious, and as if he had something on his mind to impart; and after the man had advanced more than once with a scrape of a bow and an apologetic ‘Gude-day to you, Mr. Drysdale, if you please, sir---- ’ and Tam had brushed past with a short nod, or an answering ‘Gude-day to you, Macnab--another time, I’m engaged,’ delivered unwillingly and briefly, the interruption became more serious. Sandy would not be so easily dismissed; he stood his ground and persistently pressed for a hearing. ‘I maun have a word wi’ you, Mr. Drysdale; I’ll not keep you a moment.’

‘You can have no word with me,’ forbade Tam, sternly and rudely. ‘Man, do you not see I’m about my proper business?’ (the colloquy was in a street in Glasgow); ‘I’m not to be stopped by a carle like you.’

It was the first time that auld Tam had exhibited his ascent in the social scale by employing an opprobrious term and behaving with arrogance to a social inferior. He had been wont to show himself markedly civil, even gentle, towards the class to which he had formerly belonged. He was losing his manners as well as his tranquillity in his tribulation.

‘But it’s about Rory, sir,’ Sandy explained hurriedly, in an impressive under-tone.

‘What have I to do with your Rories?’ protested Tam, in a sudden, unreasoning fury. ‘He may gang to the deevil if he likes, and you too; it is no business of mine. You know you did me out of a sum of money because a daft caird [mad tramp] in the country you hail from had a parcel of stolen auld papers--which were nothing to me--that he had travelled sooth with, expecting me, or some other fule with money in his pockets, to buy them. That I was so far left to mysel’ is no warrant for you to waylay me in the open street and pester me about a rogue and vagabond. If he had gotten his deserts I should have handed him over to the police, with you in his company. Stand out of my road, sir, or I’ll speak to Sir Jeames about this nuisance.’

Sandy Macnab gave way instantly, looking not so much indignant as confounded, which he well might be.

‘Is the honest man in a frenzy?’ he asked himself. ‘Sir Jeames, when he has risen aff his wrong side, is nothing to him. Yet I’ve aye heard that this bleacher billie [fellow] was a douce chiel and easy to deal with. I did not find him so ill to get on wi’ when I gave him a ca’ at his place; no, though puir Rory was maist rampageous, and the gentleman was a thocht hard upon me for maistering the craytur. Where would he have been without me? I’m thinking I’ve stood his friend from first to last, though I may have put my fit into the business this time. Is’t siller that makes the gentleman--auld Tam as they ca’ him--neither to haud nor to bind when his contered [crossed], or is it because he cam’ out of the gutter? I’m thinking it maun be the last, for his son, that is his partner and maun have the pouch [purse] in his turn, is a ceevil enough spoken lad. He will have learned the manners of gentlemen, and not care to rage like a bull of Bashan when there is no occasion for it. If there had been cause the thing would have been different. A man can forgie a round of curses when there is sufficient provocation. It’s a faut that the highest in the land may fa’ into without prejudice. But just because he was asked with a’ respect to stand still and lend an ear, it is preposterous. Weel, I’ve dune my best to make a clean briest and quiet Bawby Sed’s wake mind, but a wilfu’ man maun have his way, and if ill come of it the wyte’s [blame’s] none of mine.’

Sandy Macnab ceased from that day to thrust himself on Tam’s notice or to crave speech with him; but the incident had made a painful impression, which rankled in Tam’s memory. Among all the misery of this time he could not shake off the apprehension that the annoyance would repeat itself--that it had a motive which he had yet to fathom.