Chapter XXII: Rory of the Shelties Come Alive Again

Sir Hugo Willoughby had gone back to Cambridge, vowing fervently to return in the course of the summer. The injustice done to him was that everybody did not treat his vows as they deserved, but called to mind the cynical assertion that promises are, like pie-crust, made to be broken.

The Drysdales’ set in Glasgow, with Drysdale Hall and Semple Barns, had returned to their normal interests. The individual who, in the end, was the least disturbed by the advent of Sir Hugo, who had most nearly forgotten him, was young Eppie. She was more occupied with the annual transfer of the family for the month of June, from Drysdale Hall to ‘Glasgow down the water,’ with the daily visits to the pier to see her father go and come, the mornings when she was to wile him away from Glasgow, that he might spend them with her and her mother on the Clyde; the evenings when she was to coax him to take out Beardie to scour the hills or the sands. Her mind was more engrossed with a Newhaven fishwife’s costume of pink and white and dark blue, which Clary had actually encouraged her to get, and with the sea-mew’s wing which young Tam had given to her. These shining attractions were enough to supersede all the grand young English squires and baronets that had ever existed for young Eppie yet.

Trade was undergoing a shrinking process after its tremendous expansion. The horizon was already clouding over for many of the speculators. Auld Tam was not without a premonition that he also had been over-daring, and too splendidly far-reaching in his schemes. He might need all his resources before the ends met. Still he had no fear. He would weather the back-draught of the tide, when the high waters of prosperity had ebbed to the lowest mark of adversity--that as a matter of course; he would also ride triumphantly, as he had always done, over every obstacle.

No, auld Tam’s troubles at this time were still born in the bosom of his family. Young Tam, though he went on steadily enough with the business, and began to be an efficient aid to his father, disappointed him all the more by continuing to keep out of society, and to do all his visiting at Barley Riggs, as if that were the sole house he cared to visit. Auld Tam could not find that his son received any encouragement beyond the merest friendly hospitality. Indeed, Athole was not even ostensibly friendly. Perhaps it would have been safer if she had been a calm matter-of-fact friend, rather than a jesting foe--not always so much in jest that there was not a spice of wayward earnestness in her hostility. As for Dr. Peter, in the innocence of his heart, he suspected no ulterior motive; and auld Tam hated to be the man to open his friend’s eyes and to reveal himself in a new character, that of the tyrannical parent and hardened man of the world. Claribel, too, was fretting her father. After the brief interlude of Sir Hugo’s passing across the stage, when she had turned round and paused, in a waiting attitude, for what fortune might bring her, she had gone back--not so much into receiving Eneas Mackinnon’s attentions, for he did not take it upon him to pay her attentions which he could not vindicate by a statement of his prospects next day--but by the accepting of his mute allegiance. She was getting herself associated with him, talked of in connection with him. Lady Semple was beginning to look grave, to forbid Dick to bring his friend so constantly to Semple Barns if Claribel was there, and to give them separate partners at dinner.

The fact that Tam had helped the old Miss Mackinnons in their strait, only served to incense him further with their grand-nephew, for having the consummate audacity, while he passed for the most modest of men, to dangle after Clary, constitute himself her dumb waiter, the peg for her opera-cloak or shawl, the fetcher and carrier of her bouquet and fan, the runner of her errands, the trainer of her dog, the consulting physician of her horse. It was not that auld Tam had not the justice to admit that young Mackinnon’s position, in the absence of money, crippled him cruelly from doing anything worth speaking of either for his aunts or for himself. But it was the fact that in such desperate circumstances he had the assurance and selfishness to admire Clary, and get round a sensible, high-spirited girl like her, until he was tempting her to peril her brilliant prospects, which enraged her father. If she did not take care she would find that she had gone too far to stop without incurring the accusation of being a flirt and a jilt, and there were few reputations a woman could earn that appeared more odious in her father’s eyes.

But to interfere in the affairs of a girl so calm, so much the mistress of herself and the situation as Clary was, in order to tell her one or two wholesome truths, was an exercise of a father’s duties almost as repugnant to Tam as he found the obligation of hinting to Dr. Peter that Tam’s son went too often to Barley Riggs, and ought not to be encouraged in such a waste of time. Fancy Clary’s large, rather light eyes, the most defective feature in her face, fixed on her father’s with a mesmerizing effect, while he, and not she, was the agitated person! Imagine her voice, in slightly ironical accents, telling him in the spirit, if not in the letter, that she was quite able to take care of herself, he need not trouble his head about her--she knew perfectly well what she was doing!

One May evening, just before dinner, Tam was in the business-room which he had got fitted up for himself at Drysdale Hall. It was a very different place from his office in Glasgow or his office at Drysdale Haugh Works. The common use to which it was put was that of interviewing and paying the wages of domestic servants; but beyond this, it indicated Drysdale Hall to be a landed estate, and the master of Drysdale Hall a laird. Tam, like most traders who have acquired land, had, as has been said, a special pride in his fields and in all that related to them. He relished playing at laird and farmer, and was nearly as bent on heading the markets and agricultural shows with his crops and cattle, as on witching the world by his dyes and printing. His business-room was supplied with samples of seeds and grain, while the walls were hung round with such illustrations of succulent roots, and reaping and sowing machines, and such likenesses of fat cattle as one sees at railway stations in agricultural counties. A spud, with which Tam sometimes armed himself on the rare occasions when he spent an idle morning at home, stood in a corner.

Tam would sit among these suggestive touches, as a Justice of the Peace, in addition to being the master of Drysdale Hall, and dispense law after the fashion of Sir Thomas Lucy. But he was decidedly popular both as a laird and a magistrate--to an extent far more than is usual in a self-made man. A sense of his accessibility which prosperity had not diminished, of his freedom from assumption and pretence which existed side by side with his simple--one is tempted to say honest--vanity, of his inflexible fairness and human-hearted kindliness, more than outweighed the grudge at his rise in life and magnificent success.

As a result of his popularity, Tam was subjected to intrusions from other persons than policemen, poachers, and county depredators generally. He was apt to be called upon to arbitrate _ex officio_ between his humbler neighbours in the country, as between his bigger neighbours in the town. He had no doubt that he was required to judge between such a pair of brethren when two men of the lower class, but sufficiently unlike each other in most things, were shown into his sanctum, unattended by any member of the rural police, on the evening in question. Both men were Highlanders, but it was a few minutes before Tam recognised the able-bodied fellow to be Sir James Semple’s dog-man. The other, a miserable scarecrow, with a wild eye, shambled as he walked, and lugged under the arm of his faded tartan coat a battered knapsack.

‘Well, lads, what complaint have you to ludge, or advice to seek, the nicht?’ asked Tam courteously. ‘Stop, are you not one of Sir Jeames’s folk? I thocht so. Are they all well at Semple Barns? Now, what have you to say?’

‘It’s no me that has onything to say, Mr. Drysdale,’ said the voluble Sandy Macnab, immediately becoming spokesman. ‘It is this cratur that Bawby Sed, the trailin’, clashin’ [gadding, gossiping] sorry--nae thanks to her for the job--threw on my hands mair than a year syne. He’s been in Gartnavel since then, but in his wuts or oot o’ his wuts, which were but cat’s wuts to begin wi’---- ’

‘You may keep a ceevil tongue in your head,’ said Tam indignantly; ‘you have not sic a grip o’ your ain wuts that you should cast in his teeth that his have been to seek since yours came back to you.’

‘No offence,’ said Sandy, showing the example. ‘But if you only kenned, your honour, how I’m tried with the vermin--you may glower [stare] but he’s no better--you would not fash for his feelin’s. He has nae feelin’s that I can find, and he does not follow a word I say, unless it be about the ae blether that’s gotten into the daft pow [head] o’ him.’

It appeared as if Sandy were right, for not a trace of consciousness of the unceremonious remarks made upon him crossed the ugly, foxy, yet vacant face--from which almost every gleam of anything higher than the cunning of an animal had disappeared. Tam Drysdale glanced at the man with a mixture of pity and repugnance.

‘What can I do?’ asked Tam, in perplexity. ‘Why hae you brought the miserable chiel to me?’

‘Weel, the long and the short of it is, that in his wuts or out of his wuts, as I was sayin’, he has gone on maunderin’ [droning] about Drysdale Haugh, in connection with ane Mackinnon.’

‘Stay!’ said auld Tam; ‘where did I hear some story of the kind? I mind now; and it was about a man in Gartnavel, too.’

‘A’ richt, sir. But see how the wild een o’ the cratur are lichtin’ up, an’ he’s clutchin’ at the kistie under his oxter [arm]. So long as he was in Gartnavel he micht maunder as he liked; it would a’ gang to the general account--nobody would listen to the drivel; but now that he’s discharged cured--a fell-like cure, when he’s ten times sillier than before--I thocht it behoved me to communicate wi’ you or Captain Mackinnon. It micht concern a gentleman’s credit to give the laddie a hearing--though it is only some havers about seeing--selling would be liker the word--a wheen [few] auld papers he brocht with him frae the Hielants. He never trusted me wi’ them, though I’ve been the best friend he has had for mony a day. It was not with his wull that the boxie was left with me when he was taken to the asylum. They are not muckle worth whatever, not as if there had been a gude dug-cure or a famous mash for horses among them: spun-out marriage lines and a wull forty or fifty years back--that’s the head and tail of them, I believe,’ ended Sandy, with considerable scorn, betraying as he spoke a suspicious familiarity with the contents of the knapsack which had been committed to his keeping.

Rory of the Shelties made his voice be heard at last, with the startling effect of a Brutus giving forth the sentiments of a man.

‘The papers are mine,’ he said with shrill assertion. ‘They were given to me by auld Morag, her ain grannie, and she telled me to take care of them, and I have taken care--there might be a fortune in them, and the fortune is mine, every penny. Make an offer, Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh, and be quick aboot it, for I’ve been heckled [cross-examined] and hunted, and shut up in a prison. I’m thinkin’ long of the Islands, and I want to see the last of that big brute Macnab.’

‘Oh, the ungrateful demented blackgaird!’ cried Sandy, in righteous wrath. ‘I can hardly keep my hands aff him.’

Tam interposed, speaking severely.

‘It would hae better become a reasonable being, and been a greater kindness to your afflicted countryman, to have seen him on board one of the Hielant boats, where he could have begged his passage north. My man,’ turning soothingly to Rory, ‘there is no person of the name and style you mention here. Drysdale Haugh is mine, but I’m not a Mackinnon. The son of the Mackinnon you seem to be seekin’--the father has been dead for more than a score of years--is an offisher lad at the Barracks; but he has nothing to do with Drysdale Haugh,’ explained Tam with decision, ‘as I have nothing to do with the Mackinnons; however, you may seek him out and hear what he says.’

‘It was Mackinnon of Drysdale Haugh that auld Morag kenned,’ persisted Rory doggedly. ‘She gave me the names, and I’ll stick to them.’

‘You may stick to what you like, but I’m afraid it cannot be here.’ Auld Tam began to lose his patience.

‘Ane of the papers is about a Drysdale, though,’ said Sandy, unblushingly revealing more unaccounted-for knowledge. ‘That is the reason I lugget the sinner here, and no to the Barracks; but for that matter we need not have gone so far, since Captain Mackinnon’s that thrang [intimate] with our young gentleman he’s seldom awa’ frae Semple Barns.’

‘The deil thank you for as officious a scoondrel as he is a doited [stupid] ane,’ thought Tam; but he said aloud, with some alacrity--‘Let’s see the Drysdale paper. It may have reference to the auld master here. If so, I have a better right to it than any Mackinnon of them.’

‘Open your wallet, Rory!’ commanded Sandy Macnab.

‘Mak’ an offer, Mackinnon!’ yelled Rory.

‘Hout! you thrawn taed [toad], I doubt it’s ill-gotten gear at the best. What call have you to mak’ terms, affrontin’ me and tantaleezin’ a gentleman?’ and without further preamble Sandy made a spring upon the feeble defender of his property, pinned him to his seat with one hand, and with the other snatched the old knapsack, which fell on the floor, bursting open, and scattering the papers which were its contents.

Rory bit, scratched, and spat like a wild cat, but remained helpless in his assailant’s powerful grasp.

‘Hooly [hold], Macnab!’ cried Tam, and started up.

As he did so, the toe of his shoe turned over one of the bones of contention, and he saw and read the address, written in a large imposing hand, still legible, though the ink had faded, and there was the dirt of an intervening generation on the card, ‘Gavin Mackinnon, Esq., King’s Arms Inn, North Uist.’