CHAPTER VIII
DANIEL DYCE had an office up the street at the windy corner facing the Cross, with two clerks in it and a boy who docketed letters and ran errands. Once upon a time there was a partner—Cleland & Dyce the firm had been—but Cleland was a shy and melancholy man whose only hours of confidence and gayety came to him after injudicious drams. 'Twas patent to all how his habits seized him, but nobody mentioned it except in a whisper, sometimes as a kind of little accident, for in everything else he was the perfect gentleman, and here we never like to see the honest gentry down. All men liked Colin Cleland, and many would share his jovial hours who took their law business elsewhere than to Cleland & Dyce. That is the way of the world, too; most men keep their jovial-money in a different pocket from where they keep their cash. The time came when it behooved Mr. Cleland to retire. Men who knew the circumstances said Dan Dyce paid rather dear for that retirement, and indeed it might be so in the stricter way of commerce, but the lawyer was a Christian who did not hang up his conscience in the “piety press” with his Sunday clothes. He gave his partner a good deal more than he asked.
“I hope you'll come in sometimes and see me whiles at night and join in a glass of toddy,” said Mr. Cleland.
“I'll certainly come and see you,” said Dan Dyce. And then he put his arm affectionately through that of his old partner, and added, “I would—I would ca' canny wi' the toddy, Colin,” coating the pill in sweet and kindly Scots. Thank God, we have two tongues in our place, and can speak the bitter truth in terms that show humility and love, and not the sense of righteousness, dictate.
“Eh! What for?” said Mr. Cleland, his vanity at once in arms.
Dan Dyce looked in his alarmed and wavering eyes a moment, and thought, “What's the use? He knows himself, they always do!”
“For fear—for fear of fat,” he said, with a little laugh, tapping with his finger on his quondam partner's widening waistcoat. “There are signs of a prominent profile, Colin. If you go on as you're doing it will be a dreadful expense for watch-guards.”
Colin Cleland at once became the easy-osey man again, and smiled. “Fat, man! it's not fat,” said he, clapping himself on the waistcoat, “it's information. Do you know, Dan, for a second, there, I thought you meant to be unkind, and it would be devilish unlike you to be unkind. I thought you meant something else. The breath of vulgar suspicion has mentioned drink.”
“It's a pity that!” said Mr. Dyce, “for a whole cask of cloves will not disguise the breath of suspicion.” It was five years now since Colin Cleland retired among his toddy rummers, and if this were a fancy story I would be telling you how he fell, and fell, and fell, but the truth—it's almost lamentable—is that the old rogue throve on leisure and ambrosial nights with men who were now quite ready to give the firm of Daniel Dyce their business, seeing they had Colin Cleland all to themselves and under observation. Trust estates and factorages from all quarters of the county came now to the office at the windy corner. A Christian lawyer with a sense of fun, unspotted by the world, and yet with a name for winning causes, was what the shire had long been wanting. And Daniel Dyce grew rich. “I'm making money so fast,” he said one day to his sisters (it was before Bud came), “that I wonder often what poor souls are suffering for it.”