Chapter IV: Tam Drysdale’s Allies

It was impossible to stand aside and watch what went on in Tam Drysdale’s office, without seeing that he was a man of mark and influence in his sphere, not only by the number of men and of letters, in the interests of calico-printing and Turkey-red dyeing, constantly appearing on the scene, but by the tone which each speaker and writer adopted in approaching Tam. He was virtually acknowledged a leader of men in his calling. His opinion was consulted, his arbitration asked, his decision accepted. His word was in a manner law. He sat or stood there, a king in his domain. All who entered it paid him homage. His clerks were on the alert to meet his requirements. His wishes were anticipated. When he moved, everyone figuratively stood up; though literally no one hated form and ceremony more heartily than Tam Drysdale hated them. He was simple--one would say personally unassuming and unexacting in his habits, even in his greatest vanity. It was not that the man was a tyrant, or a martinet, or a fool, that he was so served and observed. It was a curious tribute to the natural strength of character, and a certain trust--inspiring, uncompromising honesty, which had always distinguished him.

Tam Drysdale’s _clientèle_ were of an agreeably varied description. They did not come all on the same day, but specimens of them turned up frequently. Old city magnates, much more imposing and fashionable than the man they called on, who gave his broad shoulders a shake, and termed his visitors ‘new-fangled;’ grave and reverend signors, pursy and fussy, in the sister trade of cotton, who could have cut huge slices from the national debt, swallowed them wholesale, and not felt themselves seriously the worse. Bankers and lawyers who have always an interest in a man of capital; clergymen who feel bound in duty to themselves to avail themselves of the command of the mammon of unrighteousness, in return for their oversight of a parishioner’s soul. Young fops and bucks who condescended to know something of the mysteries of bleaching, dyeing, and printing, that these might procure the sinews of war wherewith to wage a feud to death with the fishes in the sea, the foxes on the hillsides, the grouse on the moors, or to keep up without stint or stay the luxuries of the gentlemen’s yachts, the amenities of their clubs, the splendour of their balls.

One of the richest of these young men sauntered in, and was treated with unmistakable coolness and stiffness; while the proposal that he was there to make was curtly rejected. There had been a question of a lawsuit of no great moment in which both men were engaged. The dispute referred to an encroachment on a patent in which they were equally interested. The abuse had not gone far, and the penalty which might be exacted would only amount to a moderate sum of money, of little consequence to a man with Tom Drysdale’s income. On the other hand, the suit was likely to be both troublesome and prolonged, and all the other persons engaged in it, with the exception of the lawyers, sought to quash it at this stage. But this Tam flatly refused to do.

‘I wull not, sir,’ he said, his politeness becoming more marked, while his dialect grew broader, under the provocation. ‘It is the principle I care for; it is justice I want; I will have the knavish trick exposed. Base loons, who knew perfectly well what they were about when they used the stamp! Punish a starving man for picking my pocket, and let off lazy rascals who have not the wit to know a good discovery when it is laid before them, but are cunning enough to set themselves to steal it, and grow rich at the expense of others! Never.’

The young man had to return more quickly than he came, muttering between his teeth, when he had passed out of the inner office, ‘A dour old brute. Grist to the lawyers’ mill.’

The last of Tam Drysdale’s levée were honest practical bleachers and dyers, who came to report progress in contract, to seek employment, to enter into an alliance offensive and defensive with the master of the Drysdale Haugh Works. Of this class, though of a different sex from the other members, was a respectable modest-looking young woman, not more than comely in her personal appearance, and, though clean and neat in her dress--a calico gown, black cape, and straw bonnet--altogether sober and out of date beyond her three or four and twenty years. To her Tam Drysdale turned with marked courtesy, and showed a reflection of fatherly kindness in his manner, as he rose up, waved her to a chair in his private room, and closed the door behind her.

‘Come awa’ in, Mary, my woman; I’m very gled to see you. Sit you down and rest you: you’ve had a long drive this dull grey day. How’s your father? Eh lass! but I mind him a fine man, the buirdliest [most stalwart] bleacher far and near. Well,’ in a more subdued, sympathetic tone, in answer to a sorrowful shake of the young woman’s head, ‘the strongest of us must grow weak as water when our time comes, and he is well off to have a gude dochter like you, Mary, since his gudewife is gone, to hold together the bit bleaching-ground, and keep the pot and the kettle boiling, and mind the other mitherless weans. I’ll tell you what, Mary Coates, though you should not hear it, maybe, you’re the very picture of your mither; you’re a fine, discreet, eydent kimmer [diligent girl] that any father might be proud of, and that some lad will be blithe, as well he may be, to call his marrow some day. You shall never want any small help that I can give you in your most honourable career, both for your father and mither’s sakes and for your ain!’ exclaimed Tam Drysdale, striking his hand on his desk in the determined manner of a man who had long been unaccustomed to contradiction, and who could rise to enthusiasm on occasions.

‘Oh, sir, sir, bide a wee [wait a little] till you hear a’ before you praise me so,’ cried Mary Coates, who instead of sitting down in the comfortable chair offered to her, stood disconsolately by the table, crushing a passbook between her trembling cotton-gloved fingers. ‘I have not brocht you back a penny of the loan you were so gude as to gie us, that should have been paid this last term. I have tried my best, but trade has been slack and wages high, and father’s doctor and medicines mak’ sic a hole in what is laid by, that I have got no farther than the interest, which I think you’ll find correct. Father said I was bauld to come wi’ that alane, when it was the principal that should have been paid, and you were aye a man who stood by your word and your day. But I thocht the interest was better than naething. It would show at least,’ with the faintest dry sob, which decent reserve stopped in her throat, ‘that I was trying--that I would fain pay a’, if I could.’

‘That you would, Mary, my fine lass!’ cried Tam almost fiercely, with a suspicion of moisture in his own keen, clear eyes, ‘and so would your mither before you--a gude stock, root and branch, that’s what you are; and what’s a term or half a dozen of terms’ credit more or less between me and your father and mither’s dochter? But I’ll take the interest, because I think that will be best, and I ken it will go nearest to contenting you. Then you’ll tell me what I can do to put a job into your father’s hands, without letting on [mentioning it]; it will be a secret between you and me--after you’ve given me the news of him and the weans. Now, no thanks, Mary; I cannot abide them,’ he stopped to say peremptorily, ‘least of all from a gude young lass like you; you’ll oblige me by leaving them out, while you sit down there till I write you a receipt.’

Before Mary Coates left, Tam Drysdale went into the outer office and called one of his senior clerks to speak aside with him.

‘Mr. Dunlop, I’ve Miss Coates of the Cairnie Burn Bleaching Green with me. I want you to take her round to Fergusson’s, and see that she has the best luncheon that can be had in the place. She has a long road to drive back to Cairnie Burn. Then I want you to look over the orders and see if there is any job within Coates’s powers that you can hand over to him.’

‘Very well, sir,’ answered Mr. Dunlop, a dapper little man with a top of hair, not ten years younger than his master.

He spoke more resignedly than with the briskness natural to him. He had been taught by his grown-up daughters (Glasgow men in his class marry young) to estimate women who were not intimately connected with him a good deal by the quality and style of their dress; and he did not relish passing through the busiest streets of Glasgow, where he was well-known, to the restaurant, in company with ‘a countrified, common-looking lassie like Mary Coates,’ at the hour when a multitude of other clerks were going to their dinners.

Tam Drysdale was quick to perceive the reluctance and fiery to resent the slight to the object of his attentions.

‘Dod, man!’ he cried, with an angry snort, using the familiar form of address that cropped up in his speech occasionally to the older clerks, who had been fellow-servants with him in ‘Mackinnon and Murray’s,’ before there was any thought of a clerk becoming a master, or Drysdale Haugh returning to the hands of a Drysdale. ‘If you have any serious objections I’ll rax down my hat and go mysel’. Willie and Jean Coates’s dochter--as fine a lass as ever stepped--shall not be looked down upon or held at arm’s length, so long as I can prevent it.’

‘I have no serious objection, Mr. Drysdale,’ said Dunlop hastily, but still a little drily; ‘why should I? I’ll do my best for the party you mention, and I’ll see to the orders,’ seeking to change the subject, and at the same time not without a malicious desire to hit a weak point in his superior’s armour. ‘I thought, sir, you objected to giving them out; that you held the small bleaching and dyeing works were a mistake--a sort of snare to the petty bleachers and dyers, who came to loss and ruin in the end, so that the whole of them--works and men--should be suffered to die a natural death.’

‘There is no rule without an exception,’ said Tam shortly, for he hated inconsistency either in himself or in another. ‘Never mind what I said--I suppose I may speak at random, like my neighbours, when I do not choose to wale [choose] my words, as if they were said in the hearing of an enemy. But you are nobody’s enemy, Geordie Dunlap, that I ever heard tell of’--he corrected himself with recovered good humour--‘unless your ain whiles. For you’re a gabby [talkative] creature, and will speak up for your way of the matter, in season and out of season, as long as the breath is left in your body. Do as I bid you, and let us hear nae mair o’t.’

Tam Drysdale turned on his heel, and when he was in his room and the door shut on Mary Coates and her escort, he reflected for a moment, with his hands in his pockets, before he dismissed the whole subject, and gave his mind to some of the many other questions demanding his attention.

‘Set Geordie Dunlap up!’ he mused--‘a gusedib laddie, a ragged callant no so lang syne. No doubt it’s all the more credit to him to have worked his way up to a gude coat on his back, a gude house at Pollokshields, an elder’s seat in a U. P. Kirk, and lodgings for his family for a month at a time, instead of just the Fair-days, down the water. But he’s of another stock to the Coates; as well even them to the Duke’s race. I’m not come from the dirt myself. There were Drysdales in the Loaning, not so far from Drysdale Hall, as soon as there were Coates in Cairnie Burn, and Lamonts in the Crook. But the Coates and the Lamonts were a cast above the Drysdales when I came into the world. They had kept their bits of crofts when my father, though he was next-of-kin to Drysdale of Drysdale Haugh and the dye-works, had gone to the dogs. I mind when I would have been a proud man to have counted myself fit to walk by Jean Lamont’s side through the streets of Glasgy. Yet Geordie Dunlap, the auld puppy, thinks shame to be seen with Jean’s wiselike dochter Mary. Bowls run round, no doubt, and I grant, though I’ve the greatest--the very greatest--respect for the fine lass who is so like her douce, sonsy mither, I am not free to say, after all, that I would have cared to convoy her myself through the streets to the eating-house, or the inn where her beast is put up. A man is forced to mind the look of the thing and what belongs to his position. I might have met Clary with some of her fine graith, and it might have put the bairn about; though she’s not given to mind, which I, who have lifted her up to a higher footing, have no right to do. It’s all for the best. Jean Lamont chose Willie Coates, as she had every right to do--I said it at the time, before I had won any title to speer her price, and ask her if she would not look at me. There was no wrong done, and Willie was my friend, puir chiel’, that never reminded me how a Drysdale had fallen out of the ranks, and was no longer a mate for him any more than for Jean Lamont. I could not wish him harm, though harm enough--death, sickness, and poverty--have long had him in their grip, without any wish of mine. And I have thriven, and married bonnie Eppie Mercer--than whom a better and a bonnier wife, and a kinder soul, could not have been given to a man. She has borne me three wiselike bairns, and I’m content if they’ll but be pleased,’ with a sigh spared from his complacency for young Tam, who was unreasonably ill to please.