Chapter XXX: A Horrible Suspicion Assails Auld Tam

What was auld Tam about, that he could permit his eldest daughter, his ‘edicate, handsome, tochered lass,’ to throw herself away on a cool beggar of a penniless soldier--a man without the brains to keep his old relations from a deed which had landed them in Glasgow Gaol, and awakened the mingled laughter and pity of the whole city, the whole country? The very monstrousness of such a conjecture, the very audacity of Eneas Mackinnon’s continuing to have hopes and claims, served to put Tam off his guard. He never dreamt that any precautions were necessary after the Miss Mackinnons had done for themselves and their grand-nephew effectually.

There was more than magnanimity and good feeling in Tam’s exertions on the old ladies’ behalf--there was a certain serious conviction that in making them, all danger from that quarter was over. And auld Tam would have been right if he had not left Clary out of his calculations--if he had not failed to make allowance for a tenacity of purpose and power of getting her own way by bending everything and everybody, including the chief obstacles to her will, and the very persons who ought to have had the deciding vote, to do her bidding.

With Clary to overrule circumstances and constrain Eneas Mackinnon to follow her lead, Tam ought never to have been sure of what might or might not happen. But in addition to his false security in the persuasion that the ‘offisher lad’ would not have the face any longer to look at Clary, and that the girl herself had listened to reason and was actuated by motives of mere philanthropy, Tam Drysdale’s attention was suddenly violently distracted and held fast in another direction. A crowd of interests of greater importance--nay, of vital moment--pressed upon him, till the question of Clary and her settlement in life dwindled into a drop in the bucket, a speck on the horizon.

On the very day that Claribel’s future was settled at the gaol-door, her father had gone to the office of a solicitor named Greig, who had been employed in the Miss Mackinnons’ case, whose bill auld Tam had taken it upon him to discharge. The bill was not longer than he had expected, and he was not the man to grudge it, so that he was in a placid enough frame of mind. Having come a little distance, he felt inclined to tarry a moment and talk at his ease, particularly as the owner of the office was an exceptionally pleasant old gentleman, possessed of a good deal of curious professional information, beyond what was of a private and confidential nature, which he had no objection to air for the benefit of his clients.

‘As I told you, Mr. Drysdale,’ said Mr. Greig--a stout, bald-headed man who sat facing his visitor, slightly flourishing a pencil and laying down the law, which was in a manner his own property--‘the ladies may be thankful they got off as they did. It is an old story, the contract which gave them a claim on Strathdivie. I’m not quite clear that Fenton might not have disputed it; you see, there was a certain power vested in the Fentons, which was in itself something of a flaw. But marriage contracts are, like the marriages they represent, not things to parry with. They are about as bad as trusteeships; and I consider that it must be a most extraordinary will which gives more trouble and brings more grist to the lawyer’s mill, than these two other devices of the enemy.’

‘Do you say so, sir?’ answered Tam, who did not at the moment care much about the statement, but who had a shrewd, intelligent man’s general desire to receive trustworthy information on any subject, not to say on one which cropped up periodically in most family histories. ‘I had no marriage contract, for the very good reason that I had little enough to settle on my wife when I got her. But after a man has made some money, and has dochters belonging to him, it may be as well for him to ken what is necessary on the subject. Now that I come to think of it, I have a marriage settlement which came accidentally into my possession not very long syne.’ Some feeling of delicacy and not of craftiness prevented auld Tam from saying whose marriage settlement it was. He only added, after an instant, while the lawyer listened as if he were on the alert for what might concern himself, ‘I had almost forgotten the existence of the paper, in place of putting it into the hands of the person who has most richt to it.’

‘Then this is a most fortuitous conversation,’ said Mr. Greig briskly. ‘Take my advice, sir, and do not let the grass grow on your forwarding the deed to its proper destination. You are not aware what weighty issues may hang on its contents.’

‘Houts, Mr. Greig!’ exclaimed Tam, a little impatiently. ‘It has not to do with any living creature. Both of the contracting parties are dead, after having cleverly disposed of what they contracted for, mair than twenty years syne.’

‘That does not matter a brass farthing,’ insisted Mr. Greig, as if he enjoyed the irrelevancy of the protest, and the superiority of marriage contracts to such trifles as death and the making away with worldly goods. ‘Marriage contracts have to do with generations unborn, whom they fetter beforehand. They are no joke, Mr. Drysdale. Why, the very settlement that led indirectly to the act of which the Miss Mackinnons were guilty, might have opened your eyes alike to the security and the danger of marriage contracts.’

Tam was startled; but he failed as yet to see what might be the full significance of the communication to him.

‘I understand about a charge like that on the estate of Strathdivie,’ he said deliberately; ‘but you do not mean to say that a dead man, by the stroke of a pen, could control sale and purchase, and hinder the business of the world where his bairns’ bairns, or heirs farther off still, were in question? Let us suppose a case,’ he continued, warming to the dispute, and feeling a thrill, as it were, of premonition pass through him when he gave with double consciousness his imaginary example. ‘A bargain has been made without heed to an existing marriage contract, maybe without the knowledge of sic a trap, though, according to your tale, it is binding on both the bargainers; do you mean to tell me that the paction will be broken and some innocent man condemned to loss, because he had the misfortune to be ignorant of what was out of his way? What justice would there be in that?’

‘I’m not prepared to say about the justice,’ said Mr. Greig cautiously. ‘There may be two sides to the question, and a good deal of argument on either side. But I can speak for the law--_that_ goes as far as you say.’

‘Then I take leave to say I’ll have a poorer opinion of the law from this day,’ said Tam stiffly. ‘I was wont to think that law and justice in this country were as nearly ane as human frailty would alloo; but, if I’m to trust a legal authority, I’ve been in error.’

‘I beg your pardon, my dear sir; there are limits to marriage contracts,’ said Mr. Greig, stroking his own bald head softly. He did not wish to offend an influential client, neither did he like--to his credit--to wound an honest man.

‘I should hope so,’ said Tam sharply.

‘We have been speaking vaguely,’ went on the other, with increasing suavity; ‘we have been implying, for one thing, that there are descendants to profit by the contract, which, by-the-bye, is registered and placed where all men may read it, if they will.’

‘Humph!’ said Tam, ‘and what if they are not readers of sic documents? What if they never heard tell of sic a privilege or needcessity--whichever you may like to call it.’

Mr. Greig began again to smooth down the crown of his head tenderly, as if it had been the man he was addressing.

‘You’ve had enough to do with heritable property, Mr. Drysdale, to be well acquainted with the nature of title-deeds. You know that every prudent man--I may say, every man in his sober senses--will desire to see such deeds before he invests in the lands or the houses that the papers represent. Well then, marriage contracts are not so far out of the category. A purchaser who has any reason to suppose there may have been such a contract, or indeed without supposing at all, for the greater assurance of himself and his family, is bound to apply for a warrant, called “a search,” to satisfy himself that there is no prior obligation to interfere with his future rights.’

‘That is to say,’ said Tam, with a fine flavour of irony, ‘he should prepare for falling among thieves.’

‘He might do worse,’ said the lawyer, with a laugh, declining to make a personal application of the remark. ‘I am aware that the precaution is often neglected among acquaintances and friends, but it ought not to be. You know the Spanish proverb, about not trusting your own father to count money.’

‘It is a blackguard saying!’ cried Tam indignantly.

‘I am afraid it is,’ admitted Mr. Greig candidly. ‘But apart from that, there may be ignorance, as you said, on both sides, in selling without the liberty to sell, as well as in buying without the power to buy. Surely, without any prejudice, it is a duty to guard against the possibility of such mutually ruinous ignorance, though there are other laws that offer some compensation to the unwary.’

‘I cannot stop to hear them; and I am free to own that what I have heard does not recommend itself to me. But marriage contracts are not things that I have ony troke with as yet,’ he added with sudden decision while he rose, ‘even if I had not got enough of law for one day--if you will forgive me for saying so, Mr. Greig,’ ended Tam, recovering his natural courtesy.

Mr. Greig balanced his pencil between his fingers after Tam had left him, and pondered a moment.

‘I thought auld Tam Drysdale had been less stupid and better informed,’ he ruminated, with a shade of professional narrowness. ‘He is more intolerant and less reasonable than I had pictured him. I dare say his success is wasting him and making a bully of him--I have often seen the process--or he may have been bitten in some of his purchases; they say he is adding field to field, and buying in all the small crofts about Drysdale Haugh. These prosperous men hate to be beaten in the value of a halfpenny. Anyway, he will not grant even to himself that he has come off the loser by the business. He’s a dour dog, auld Tam, but he’s not the worst sort. I was a fool to stroke him the wrong way; however, he’s not the kind that bears malice.’

The lawyer--lawyer though he was--failed to connect the momentary heat which Tam had shown, with his voluntary announcement, at the beginning of the conversation, that he had come into the possession of a marriage contract which was none of his. Nor, for that matter, did Tam in so many words acknowledge to himself that there was any link between the two facts, unless by the vehemence with which he kept repeating, as he drove out the same afternoon to Drysdale Hall, that he had nothing to do with such riddles, such provisions made, and snares laid for the unsuspecting.

Mrs. Gavin Mackinnon, Miss Craig that was, had given her husband the power of selling Drysdale Haugh and the dyeworks to Tam Drysdale. Why should she have been at the trouble and expense of granting the man such power, if it was not hers to grant, if in professing to do so she defrauded generations unborn--generations descended from her and Guy Mackinnon? Would she not take care that everything was plain when it was so much her own interest to be careful? He, Tam Drysdale, had bought the place in good faith, with honest money, hardly won, and the farm and the works had belonged to his father’s kinsman--to a Drysdale, long before the name of Mackinnon had been heard on the Aytoun Water. Who would be mad enough to dispute Tam’s purchase? What law was there in the universe that could dare to call itself law, and at the same time question his title to Drysdale Haugh?

But was there any mention of heirs in that ill-preserved, ill-gotten contract between Eneas Mackinnon and Margaret Craig which had reached him--Tam Drysdale--by a strange mischance, if not by a projected fraud?

He could not for the life of him answer the question, at which he kept quarrying afresh during every mile of the road between Glasgow and Drysdale Hall. Was there no mention of children in the contract, as there certainly was not in that will of old Drysdale’s, for which Tam had proposed to barter the other? or was there no such coincidence, which would in itself, perhaps, have been singular? Had he merely overlooked the clause because the paper had struck him as worse than useless, a record of disappointed hopes and lost opportunities?

All the time that Tam was scouting the apprehension as unreasonable and impracticable, and telling himself what a fool he was to suffer even a momentary scare from the long-winded sentences and long-nebbed words of a book-man--a lawyer--he harassed himself with a fruitless effort to satisfy this doubt. ‘Whitebreeks’ went through his paces uselessly, where his master was concerned. For once the school-children, lingering for him at Birlie Brae, looked wistfully in his face, and meeting no responsive glance, shrank from hanging on to the dogcart, and fell back discomfited, deprived of the ride which he himself had described as so sweet a pleasure to juvenile trespassers. Auld Tam neither saw their wonder and disappointment, nor did he observe beast or bird, field or hedgerow, on his homeward way through the stubble-fields, and between the hedges growing red with hips and haws. He was in a brown study--most unusual with him--the whole road.

Thompson, the groom, glancing askance at his master, gave his own head ever so slight a shake--either auld Tam was on the verge of a fit of apoplexy, or, as the idea of any other loss of power in that quarter was unfamiliar to the servant, he judged his master must have made another leap to the heights of fortune, which would land him among dukes and earls, and take him away from driving in a dogcart to and from a city office. But would he ever be so happy again in the highest places, as when Thompson drove him behind ‘Whitebreeks’ as regular as the clock, going over the ground--every inch of which he knew--in a given time, neither too fast nor too slow, but just what was fit for a gentleman of auld Tam’s years and substance, with the progress made between his grand house and his place of business, where he had risen from being a working man and earned all his money? Thompson made the reflection on his own account sentimentally.

The spell was not broken by the appearance of the two Eppies, ready to meet and greet the husband and father. Yet neither did their presence, nor the sight of Drysdale Hall, in what its master had fondly regarded as its perfection, inflict a pang, as they might have done, or might come to do. He only saw them as in a dream. The most active trouble he was sensible of assailed him when his eye fell upon young Tam, whose hours were not the same as his father’s, and who generally returned by the railway, which had a station near the bleachfield. His father had been so eager to embark young Tam with him in the business in which he was now a partner, with a share in its liabilities as well as its profits, that the elder man had forgotten the responsibilities which he laid upon his son.

Auld Tam put a force upon himself--he had early learnt self-mastery--he met the advances of his family, he went and dressed for dinner, and sat at the foot of his table in the ordinary fashion. But the impulse was strong upon him to dispense with the usual arrangements and burdensome formalities, including the eating of the principal meal of the day, set all aside, retire to his business-room, and there investigate the terror that--pretend to himself as he might--was chilling his blood and tugging every moment harder at his heart-strings.

Only love, watching auld Tam with Argus-eyes, detected that his appetite and his conversation were the result of a hard struggle. It was the elder Eppie who made the discovery, which astonished and even frightened her a little. But tender affection has its sure intuitions and is equal to most situations; besides, both of the Eppies had a fine good sense of their own. Mrs. Drysdale would not call attention to a mood of body and mind which it was clear her husband sought to keep to himself, by assailing him with observations and inquiries. She behaved with true delicacy--not even approaching him on the plea of ministering to his wants. She kept back young Eppie with her smaller experience, taking her aside and telling her simply father had ‘a sore head,’ and would prefer to be undisturbed; she might give him a song by-and-by, if he came into the drawing-room.

Supposing it was his heart and not his head which ailed auld Tam, Eppie, in the middle of her abounding sympathy, was willing to wait her husband’s time to communicate his cares.

At last auld Tam could retreat to his den--his innocent stage for playing at being a laird and a J.P., where he had not even been cumbered by business routine. He closed the door, bolted it for the first time in his life, looked round on the engravings of reaping machines, Brobdignagian turnips and fat cattle, felt the discrepancy between the past and the present, and said grimly to himself, ‘I micht be going to commit a murder,’ and then went straight to his desk, unlocked it, and turned to the compartment in which he had put the two papers, till he could see Lieutenant Mackinnon about them. Succeeding events, conspicuous among them the danger in which the Miss Mackinnons had stood, had occupied him and prevented him from carrying out his intention. In fact, he had been hindered from thinking, with any distinct purpose, till that day of Sandy Macnab’s call with Rory o’ the Shelties, and of the deed and the contract which auld Tam had taken into his own hands, under the impression that the papers were safer with him than with a crazy Highland beggar. Certainly, when Tam had paid for them, it had been more from a movement of half-reluctant compassion for a miserable fatuous wretch who had deluded and overreached himself, than as offering a price for documents, one of which had no interest, and the other only a sentimental attraction, for him.

There were the two old battered but still perfectly legible papers, with the more modern slip appended by some officious pedantic Highland minister or schoolmaster, as Tam had left them, safe enough in truth. He began to wish he had never seen the deeds, that they had been relinquished to the tender mercies of a madman. If Sandy Macnab had not been so forward--if Rory had not been so greedy, and cunning, and weak of wit--if that strange minister or schoolmaster had not been so punctilious, the papers might have lain still where the careless, swaggering sinner Guy Mackinnon had left them, and plagued nobody.

But since they were here in his desk, by a queer coincidence, they must be dealt with.

Auld Tam sat down and proceeded to meet his fate. Yet, brave man as he was, he continued to dally with it, to tell himself he was grossly exaggerating the importance of the contents of one of these papers. Since Mrs. Mackinnon had given her husband the power to sell Drysdale Hall, such a power must have existed; neither he nor she could have been such an idiot as to take the power for granted, be guilty of an unlawful act, and commit a wrong against their children, born or unborn.

As it happened, the will which Tam Drysdale had looked at last, the only time he had gone over the deeds, was lying on the top of the contract. He took it up and began to read it through, word for word, as if it had been that with which he had to do--as if it were likely to contain some information which might throw light on the uncertainty with regard to the provisions of the other--an uncertainty which one glance at the proper place would determine for ever.

But old Drysdale’s will disinheriting auld Tam’s father had nothing more to say to his son than it had said before, even though he methodically reckoned up the period between the dates of the deaths of the uncle in Scotland and the adopted niece in India--which had made all the difference in the world in the succession, and enabled Maggie Craig to step into her mother’s shoes and keep out the Drysdale cousin.

With one hard-drawn breath, auld Tam put down the will and took up the marriage contract, reading it as he had read the other, line by line and sentence by sentence, through a few of the ancient barbarous words and a dozen of the labyrinthian repetitions in which the law delights. At last he came to the technical phrases, standing out on the page as if to strike him a blow, written as if in letters of fire to burn into his brain the disastrous intimation which they contained. Yes, the children born of the marriage of Gavin Mackinnon and Margaret Craig, their heirs, male and female, were deliberately set forth, mentioned, and re-mentioned, as if they were the very persons for whom the contract had been made, in whose protection it still unfolded its yellow parchment wings, and commanded all infringers of its obligations to renounce their unwarrantable assumptions and disgorge their dishonest gains.

It became clear as day to Tam Drysdale, in less than a moment, that neither Gavin Mackinnon nor his wife had held the right to sell Drysdale Haugh, which was reserved for the children that might be born to them. It was also plain enough to a man who had known something of the couple--how it had happened--that there was nothing wonderful in it unless the recklessness and folly of all concerned--himself included. Mr. and Mrs. Mackinnon had been the very pair likely to get sick of the unsuccessful struggle with the bleachfields and printingworks, to be ready to shift them on other shoulders--first, on their partner’s, Mr. Murray’s, and then on Tam’s. The husband and wife had been just the people who would naturally snatch at the opportunity of getting rid of the whole concern, and of having a sum of ready money substituted for an unremunerative farm and a distasteful business. They would not stay to investigate the power to work their will, they would take it for granted. The two men who might have called the full-grown children to account, the lawyers who had framed the settlement for preventing such a disposal of the inheritance, with the trustees, were either out of the way, or dead. The contract itself was not forthcoming. Lieutenant Eneas, if a baby’s feeble voice could have been heard protesting against the injury inflicted on his prospects, was not born. It might have been that the future parents had given up the expectation of having children, and when the unlooked-for event was foreshadowed had decided between themselves that what was done could not be undone, and that the child would experience no great loss in the withdrawal from its keeping of a succession which had prospered so ill with his father and mother.

All had favoured the fatal blundering. Auld Tam was not free from blame. A dim recollection came back upon him which sickened him, as with a throe of remorse and rage, at his own infatuation. Somebody, he could no longer tell whom--some cautious old friend or sharp-sighted associate--had spoken to him of the possible existence of prior contracts, apart from the title-deeds, and advised a reference to them. And he had thought the friend timid, and the associate picking a hole in Tam’s coat. For he, too, had been eager and set on his purchase. He had derided the idea of any obstacle. He had insisted that he knew all about Drysdale Haugh and the Mackinnons, and that in the face of such intimate acquaintance further trouble and expense were uncalled for. His penny-saving thrift, on which he had prided himself all his life, had come in and forbidden him to expend a few pounds in order to prevent the risk of thousands, the danger of a life’s efforts and ambitions being frustrated at the eleventh hour.