CHAPTER I—INTRODUCES THE ADMIRAL

Transcribed from the 1905 Chatto & Windus edition by David Price, email

ccx074@pglaf.org

TALES AND FANTASIES

BY

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

[Picture: Decorative graphic]

* * * * *

LONDON

CHATTO & WINDUS

1905

CONTENTS

THE MISADVENTURES OF JOHN NICHOLSON

CHAP. PAGE

I. IN WHICH JOHN SOWS THE WIND 1

II. IN WHICH JOHN REAPS THE WHIRLWIND 10

III. IN WHICH JOHN ENJOYS THE HARVEST HOME 18

IV. THE SECOND SOWING 27

V. THE PRODIGAL’S RETURN 35

VI. THE HOUSE AT MURRAYFIELD 45

VII. A TRAGI-COMEDY IN A CAB 63

VIII. SINGULAR INSTANCE OF THE UTILITY OF PASS-KEYS 78

IX. IN WHICH MR. NICHOLSON ACCEPTS THE PRINCIPLE 95

OF AN ALLOWANCE

THE BODY-SNATCHER 109

THE STORY OF A LIE

I. INTRODUCES THE ADMIRAL 145

II. A LETTER TO THE PAPERS 154

III. IN THE ADMIRAL’S NAME 162

IV. ESTHER ON THE FILIAL RELATION 172

V. THE PRODIGAL FATHER MAKES HIS DEBUT AT HOME 178

VI. THE PRODIGAL FATHER GOES ON FROM STRENGTH TO 189

STRENGTH

VII. THE ELOPEMENT 204

VIII. BATTLE ROYAL 219

IX. IN WHICH THE LIBERAL EDITOR RE-APPEARS AS 233

‘DEUS EX MACHINA’

THE MISADVENTURES OF JOHN NICHOLSON

CHAPTER I—IN WHICH JOHN SOWS THE WIND

JOHN VAREY NICHOLSON was stupid; yet, stupider men than he are now

sprawling in Parliament, and lauding themselves as the authors of their

own distinction. He was of a fat habit, even from boyhood, and inclined

to a cheerful and cursory reading of the face of life; and possibly this

attitude of mind was the original cause of his misfortunes. Beyond this

hint philosophy is silent on his career, and superstition steps in with

the more ready explanation that he was detested of the gods.

His father—that iron gentleman—had long ago enthroned himself on the

heights of the Disruption Principles. What these are (and in spite of

their grim name they are quite innocent) no array of terms would render

thinkable to the merely English intelligence; but to the Scot they often

prove unctuously nourishing, and Mr. Nicholson found in them the milk of

lions. About the period when the churches convene at Edinburgh in their

annual assemblies, he was to be seen descending the Mound in the company

of divers red-headed clergymen: these voluble, he only contributing

oracular nods, brief negatives, and the austere spectacle of his

stretched upper lip. The names of Candlish and Begg were frequent in

these interviews, and occasionally the talk ran on the Residuary

Establishment and the doings of one Lee. A stranger to the tight little

theological kingdom of Scotland might have listened and gathered

literally nothing. And Mr. Nicholson (who was not a dull man) knew this,

and raged at it. He knew there was a vast world outside, to whom

Disruption Principles were as the chatter of tree-top apes; the paper

brought him chill whiffs from it; he had met Englishmen who had asked

lightly if he did not belong to the Church of Scotland, and then had

failed to be much interested by his elucidation of that nice point; it

was an evil, wild, rebellious world, lying sunk in _dozenedness_, for

nothing short of a Scots word will paint this Scotsman’s feelings. And

when he entered into his own house in Randolph Crescent (south side), and

shut the door behind him, his heart swelled with security. Here, at

least, was a citadel impregnable by right-hand defections or left-hand

extremes. Here was a family where prayers came at the same hour, where

the Sabbath literature was unimpeachably selected, where the guest who

should have leaned to any false opinion was instantly set down, and over

which there reigned all week, and grew denser on Sundays, a silence that

was agreeable to his ear, and a gloom that he found comfortable.

Mrs. Nicholson had died about thirty, and left him with three children: a

daughter two years, and a son about eight years younger than John; and

John himself, the unlucky bearer of a name infamous in English history.

The daughter, Maria, was a good girl—dutiful, pious, dull, but so easily

startled that to speak to her was quite a perilous enterprise. ‘I don’t

think I care to talk about that, if you please,’ she would say, and

strike the boldest speechless by her unmistakable pain; this upon all

topics—dress, pleasure, morality, politics, in which the formula was

changed to ‘my papa thinks otherwise,’ and even religion, unless it was

approached with a particular whining tone of voice. Alexander, the

younger brother, was sickly, clever, fond of books and drawing, and full

of satirical remarks. In the midst of these, imagine that natural,

clumsy, unintelligent, and mirthful animal, John; mighty well-behaved in

comparison with other lads, although not up to the mark of the house in

Randolph Crescent; full of a sort of blundering affection, full of

caresses, which were never very warmly received; full of sudden and loud

laughter which rang out in that still house like curses. Mr. Nicholson

himself had a great fund of humour, of the Scots order—intellectual,

turning on the observation of men; his own character, for instance—if he

could have seen it in another—would have been a rare feast to him; but

his son’s empty guffaws over a broken plate, and empty, almost

light-hearted remarks, struck him with pain as the indices of a weak

mind.

Outside the family John had early attached himself (much as a dog may

follow a marquis) to the steps of Alan Houston, a lad about a year older

than himself, idle, a trifle wild, the heir to a good estate which was

still in the hands of a rigorous trustee, and so royally content with

himself that he took John’s devotion as a thing of course. The intimacy

was gall to Mr. Nicholson; it took his son from the house, and he was a

jealous parent; it kept him from the office, and he was a martinet;

lastly, Mr. Nicholson was ambitious for his family (in which, and the

Disruption Principles, he entirely lived), and he hated to see a son of

his play second fiddle to an idler. After some hesitation, he ordered

that the friendship should cease—an unfair command, though seemingly

inspired by the spirit of prophecy; and John, saying nothing, continued

to disobey the order under the rose.

John was nearly nineteen when he was one day dismissed rather earlier

than usual from his father’s office, where he was studying the practice

of the law. It was Saturday; and except that he had a matter of four

hundred pounds in his pocket which it was his duty to hand over to the

British Linen Company’s Bank, he had the whole afternoon at his disposal.

He went by Princes Street enjoying the mild sunshine, and the little

thrill of easterly wind that tossed the flags along that terrace of

palaces, and tumbled the green trees in the garden. The band was playing

down in the valley under the castle; and when it came to the turn of the

pipers, he heard their wild sounds with a stirring of the blood.

Something distantly martial woke in him; and he thought of Miss

Mackenzie, whom he was to meet that day at dinner.

Now, it is undeniable that he should have gone directly to the bank, but

right in the way stood the billiard-room of the hotel where Alan was

almost certain to be found; and the temptation proved too strong. He

entered the billiard-room, and was instantly greeted by his friend, cue

in hand.

‘Nicholson,’ said he, ‘I want you to lend me a pound or two till Monday.’

‘You’ve come to the right shop, haven’t you?’ returned John. ‘I have

twopence.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Alan. ‘You can get some. Go and borrow at your

tailor’s; they all do it. Or I’ll tell you what: pop your watch.’

‘Oh, yes, I dare say,’ said John. ‘And how about my father?’

‘How is he to know? He doesn’t wind it up for you at night, does he?’

inquired Alan, at which John guffawed. ‘No, seriously; I am in a fix,’

continued the tempter. ‘I have lost some money to a man here. I’ll give

it you to-night, and you can get the heir-loom out again on Monday.

Come; it’s a small service, after all. I would do a good deal more for

you.’

Whereupon John went forth, and pawned his gold watch under the assumed

name of John Froggs, 85 Pleasance. But the nervousness that assailed him

at the door of that inglorious haunt—a pawnshop—and the effort necessary

to invent the pseudonym (which, somehow, seemed to him a necessary part

of the procedure), had taken more time than he imagined: and when he

returned to the billiard-room with the spoils, the bank had already

closed its doors.

This was a shrewd knock. ‘A piece of business had been neglected.’ He

heard these words in his father’s trenchant voice, and trembled, and then

dodged the thought. After all, who was to know? He must carry four

hundred pounds about with him till Monday, when the neglect could be

surreptitiously repaired; and meanwhile, he was free to pass the

afternoon on the encircling divan of the billiard-room, smoking his pipe,

sipping a pint of ale, and enjoying to the masthead the modest pleasures

of admiration.

None can admire like a young man. Of all youth’s passions and pleasures,

this is the most common and least alloyed; and every flash of Alan’s

black eyes; every aspect of his curly head; every graceful reach, every

easy, stand-off attitude of waiting; ay, and down to his shirt-sleeves

and wrist-links, were seen by John through a luxurious glory. He valued

himself by the possession of that royal friend, hugged himself upon the

thought, and swam in warm azure; his own defects, like vanquished

difficulties, becoming things on which to plume himself. Only when he

thought of Miss Mackenzie there fell upon his mind a shadow of regret;

that young lady was worthy of better things than plain John Nicholson,

still known among schoolmates by the derisive name of ‘Fatty’; and he

felt, if he could chalk a cue, or stand at ease, with such a careless

grace as Alan, he could approach the object of his sentiments with a less

crushing sense of inferiority.

Before they parted, Alan made a proposal that was startling in the

extreme. He would be at Colette’s that night about twelve, he said. Why

should not John come there and get the money? To go to Colette’s was to

see life, indeed; it was wrong; it was against the laws; it partook, in a

very dingy manner, of adventure. Were it known, it was the sort of

exploit that disconsidered a young man for good with the more serious

classes, but gave him a standing with the riotous. And yet Colette’s was

not a hell; it could not come, without vaulting hyperbole, under the

rubric of a gilded saloon; and, if it was a sin to go there, the sin was

merely local and municipal. Colette (whose name I do not know how to

spell, for I was never in epistolary communication with that hospitable

outlaw) was simply an unlicensed publican, who gave suppers after eleven

at night, the Edinburgh hour of closing. If you belonged to a club, you

could get a much better supper at the same hour, and lose not a jot in

public esteem. But if you lacked that qualification, and were an

hungered, or inclined toward conviviality at unlawful hours, Colette’s

was your only port. You were very ill-supplied. The company was not

recruited from the Senate or the Church, though the Bar was very well

represented on the only occasion on which I flew in the face of my

country’s laws, and, taking my reputation in my hand, penetrated into

that grim supper-house. And Colette’s frequenters, thrillingly conscious

of wrong-doing and ‘that two-handed engine (the policeman) at the door,’

were perhaps inclined to somewhat feverish excess. But the place was in

no sense a very bad one; and it is somewhat strange to me, at this

distance of time, how it had acquired its dangerous repute.

In precisely the same spirit as a man may debate a project to ascend the

Matterhorn or to cross Africa, John considered Alan’s proposal, and,

greatly daring, accepted it. As he walked home, the thoughts of this

excursion out of the safe places of life into the wild and arduous,

stirred and struggled in his imagination with the image of Miss

Mackenzie—incongruous and yet kindred thoughts, for did not each imply

unusual tightening of the pegs of resolution? did not each woo him forth

and warn him back again into himself?

Between these two considerations, at least, he was more than usually

moved; and when he got to Randolph Crescent, he quite forgot the four

hundred pounds in the inner pocket of his greatcoat, hung up the coat,

with its rich freight, upon his particular pin of the hatstand; and in

the very action sealed his doom.

CHAPTER II—IN WHICH JOHN REAPS THE WHIRLWIND

ABOUT half-past ten it was John’s brave good fortune to offer his arm to

Miss Mackenzie, and escort her home. The night was chill and starry; all

the way eastward the trees of the different gardens rustled and looked

black. Up the stone gully of Leith Walk, when they came to cross it, the

breeze made a rush and set the flames of the street-lamps quavering; and

when at last they had mounted to the Royal Terrace, where Captain

Mackenzie lived, a great salt freshness came in their faces from the sea.

These phases of the walk remained written on John’s memory, each

emphasised by the touch of that light hand on his arm; and behind all

these aspects of the nocturnal city he saw, in his mind’s-eye, a picture

of the lighted drawing-room at home where he had sat talking with Flora;

and his father, from the other end, had looked on with a kind and

ironical smile. John had read the significance of that smile, which

might have escaped a stranger. Mr. Nicholson had remarked his son’s

entanglement with satisfaction, tinged by humour; and his smile, if it

still was a thought contemptuous, had implied consent.

At the captain’s door the girl held out her hand, with a certain

emphasis; and John took it and kept it a little longer, and said,

‘Good-night, Flora, dear,’ and was instantly thrown into much fear by his

presumption. But she only laughed, ran up the steps, and rang the bell;

and while she was waiting for the door to open, kept close in the porch,

and talked to him from that point as out of a fortification. She had a

knitted shawl over her head; her blue Highland eyes took the light from

the neighbouring street-lamp and sparkled; and when the door opened and

closed upon her, John felt cruelly alone.

He proceeded slowly back along the terrace in a tender glow; and when he

came to Greenside Church, he halted in a doubtful mind. Over the crown

of the Calton Hill, to his left, lay the way to Colette’s, where Alan

would soon be looking for his arrival, and where he would now have no

more consented to go than he would have wilfully wallowed in a bog; the

touch of the girl’s hand on his sleeve, and the kindly light in his

father’s eyes, both loudly forbidding. But right before him was the way

home, which pointed only to bed, a place of little ease for one whose

fancy was strung to the lyrical pitch, and whose not very ardent heart

was just then tumultuously moved. The hilltop, the cool air of the

night, the company of the great monuments, the sight of the city under

his feet, with its hills and valleys and crossing files of lamps, drew

him by all he had of the poetic, and he turned that way; and by that

quite innocent deflection, ripened the crop of his venial errors for the

sickle of destiny.

On a seat on the hill above Greenside he sat for perhaps half an hour,

looking down upon the lamps of Edinburgh, and up at the lamps of heaven.

Wonderful were the resolves he formed; beautiful and kindly were the

vistas of future life that sped before him. He uttered to himself the

name of Flora in so many touching and dramatic keys, that he became at

length fairly melted with tenderness, and could have sung aloud. At that

juncture a certain creasing in his greatcoat caught his ear. He put his

hand into his pocket, pulled forth the envelope that held the money, and

sat stupefied. The Calton Hill, about this period, had an ill name of

nights; and to be sitting there with four hundred pounds that did not

belong to him was hardly wise. He looked up. There was a man in a very

bad hat a little on one side of him, apparently looking at the scenery;

from a little on the other a second night-walker was drawing very quietly

near. Up jumped John. The envelope fell from his hands; he stooped to

get it, and at the same moment both men ran in and closed with him.

A little after, he got to his feet very sore and shaken, the poorer by a

purse which contained exactly one penny postage-stamp, by a cambric

handkerchief, and by the all-important envelope.

Here was a young man on whom, at the highest point of lovely exaltation,

there had fallen a blow too sharp to be supported alone; and not many

hundred yards away his greatest friend was sitting at supper—ay, and even

expecting him. Was it not in the nature of man that he should run there?

He went in quest of sympathy—in quest of that droll article that we all

suppose ourselves to want when in a strait, and have agreed to call

advice; and he went, besides, with vague but rather splendid expectations

of relief. Alan was rich, or would be so when he came of age. By a

stroke of the pen he might remedy this misfortune, and avert that dreaded

interview with Mr. Nicholson, from which John now shrunk in imagination

as the hand draws back from fire.

Close under the Calton Hill there runs a certain narrow avenue, part

street, part by-road. The head of it faces the doors of the prison; its

tail descends into the sunless slums of the Low Calton. On one hand it

is overhung by the crags of the hill, on the other by an old graveyard.

Between these two the roadway runs in a trench, sparsely lighted at

night, sparsely frequented by day, and bordered, when it was cleared the

place of tombs, by dingy and ambiguous houses. One of these was the

house of Colette; and at his door our ill-starred John was presently

beating for admittance. In an evil hour he satisfied the jealous

inquiries of the contraband hotel-keeper; in an evil hour he penetrated

into the somewhat unsavoury interior. Alan, to be sure, was there,

seated in a room lighted by noisy gas-jets, beside a dirty table-cloth,

engaged on a coarse meal, and in the company of several tipsy members of

the junior bar. But Alan was not sober; he had lost a thousand pounds

upon a horse-race, had received the news at dinner-time, and was now, in

default of any possible means of extrication, drowning the memory of his

predicament. He to help John! The thing was impossible; he couldn’t

help himself.

‘If you have a beast of a father,’ said he, ‘I can tell you I have a

brute of a trustee.’

‘I’m not going to hear my father called a beast,’ said John with a

beating heart, feeling that he risked the last sound rivet of the chain

that bound him to life.

But Alan was quite good-natured.

‘All right, old fellow,’ said he. ‘Mos’ respec’able man your father.’

And he introduced his friend to his companions as ‘old Nicholson the

what-d’ye-call-um’s son.’

John sat in dumb agony. Colette’s foul walls and maculate table-linen,

and even down to Colette’s villainous casters, seemed like objects in a

nightmare. And just then there came a knock and a scurrying; the police,

so lamentably absent from the Calton Hill, appeared upon the scene; and

the party, taken _flagrante delicto_, with their glasses at their elbow,

were seized, marched up to the police office, and all duly summoned to

appear as witnesses in the consequent case against that arch-shebeener,

Colette.

It was a sorrowful and a mightily sobered company that came forth again.

The vague terror of public opinion weighed generally on them all; but

there were private and particular horrors on the minds of individuals.

Alan stood in dread of his trustee, already sorely tried. One of the

group was the son of a country minister, another of a judge; John, the

unhappiest of all, had David Nicholson to father, the idea of facing whom

on such a scandalous subject was physically sickening. They stood awhile

consulting under the buttresses of Saint Giles; thence they adjourned to

the lodgings of one of the number in North Castle Street, where (for that

matter) they might have had quite as good a supper, and far better drink,

than in the dangerous paradise from which they had been routed. There,

over an almost tearful glass, they debated their position. Each

explained he had the world to lose if the affair went on, and he appeared

as a witness. It was remarkable what bright prospects were just then in

the very act of opening before each of that little company of youths, and

what pious consideration for the feelings of their families began now to

well from them. Each, moreover, was in an odd state of destitution. Not

one could bear his share of the fine; not one but evinced a wonderful

twinkle of hope that each of the others (in succession) was the very man

who could step in to make good the deficit. One took a high hand; he

could not pay his share; if it went to a trial, he should bolt; he had

always felt the English Bar to be his true sphere. Another branched out

into touching details about his family, and was not listened to. John,

in the midst of this disorderly competition of poverty and meanness, sat

stunned, contemplating the mountain bulk of his misfortunes.

At last, upon a pledge that each should apply to his family with a common

frankness, this convention of unhappy young asses broke up, went down the

common stair, and in the grey of the spring morning, with the streets

lying dead empty all about them, the lamps burning on into the daylight

in diminished lustre, and the birds beginning to sound premonitory notes

from the groves of the town gardens, went each his own way with bowed

head and echoing footfall.

The rooks were awake in Randolph Crescent; but the windows looked down,

discreetly blinded, on the return of the prodigal. John’s pass-key was a

recent privilege; this was the first time it had been used; and, oh! with

what a sickening sense of his unworthiness he now inserted it into the

well-oiled lock and entered that citadel of the proprieties! All slept;

the gas in the hall had been left faintly burning to light his return; a

dreadful stillness reigned, broken by the deep ticking of the eight-day

clock. He put the gas out, and sat on a chair in the hall, waiting and

counting the minutes, longing for any human countenance. But when at

last he heard the alarm spring its rattle in the lower story, and the

servants begin to be about, he instantly lost heart, and fled to his own

room, where he threw himself upon the bed.

CHAPTER III—IN WHICH JOHN ENJOYS THE HARVEST HOME

SHORTLY after breakfast, at which he assisted with a highly tragical

countenance, John sought his father where he sat, presumably in religious

meditation, on the Sabbath mornings. The old gentleman looked up with

that sour, inquisitive expression that came so near to smiling and was so

different in effect.

‘This is a time when I do not like to be disturbed,’ he said.

‘I know that,’ returned John; ‘but I have—I want—I’ve made a dreadful

mess of it,’ he broke out, and turned to the window.

Mr. Nicholson sat silent for an appreciable time, while his unhappy son

surveyed the poles in the back green, and a certain yellow cat that was

perched upon the wall. Despair sat upon John as he gazed; and he raged

to think of the dreadful series of his misdeeds, and the essential

innocence that lay behind them.

‘Well,’ said the father, with an obvious effort, but in very quiet tones,

‘what is it?’

‘Maclean gave me four hundred pounds to put in the bank, sir,’ began

John; ‘and I’m sorry to say that I’ve been robbed of it!’

‘Robbed of it?’ cried Mr. Nicholson, with a strong rising inflection.

‘Robbed? Be careful what you say, John!’

‘I can’t say anything else, sir; I was just robbed of it,’ said John, in

desperation, sullenly.

‘And where and when did this extraordinary event take place?’ inquired

the father.

‘On the Calton Hill about twelve last night.’

‘The Calton Hill?’ repeated Mr. Nicholson. ‘And what were you doing

there at such a time of the night?’

‘Nothing, sir,’ says John.

Mr. Nicholson drew in his breath.

‘And how came the money in your hands at twelve last night?’ he asked,

sharply.

‘I neglected that piece of business,’ said John, anticipating comment;

and then in his own dialect: ‘I clean forgot all about it.’

‘Well,’ said his father, ‘it’s a most extraordinary story. Have you

communicated with the police?’

‘I have,’ answered poor John, the blood leaping to his face. ‘They think

they know the men that did it. I dare say the money will be recovered,

if that was all,’ said he, with a desperate indifference, which his

father set down to levity; but which sprung from the consciousness of

worse behind.

‘Your mother’s watch, too?’ asked Mr. Nicholson.

‘Oh, the watch is all right!’ cried John. ‘At least, I mean I was coming

to the watch—the fact is, I am ashamed to say, I—I had pawned the watch

before. Here is the ticket; they didn’t find that; the watch can be

redeemed; they don’t sell pledges.’ The lad panted out these phrases,

one after another, like minute guns; but at the last word, which rang in

that stately chamber like an oath, his heart failed him utterly; and the

dreaded silence settled on father and son.

It was broken by Mr. Nicholson picking up the pawn-ticket: ‘John Froggs,

85 Pleasance,’ he read; and then turning upon John, with a brief flash of

passion and disgust, ‘Who is John Froggs?’ he cried.

‘Nobody,’ said John. ‘It was just a name.’

‘An _alias_,’ his father commented.

‘Oh! I think scarcely quite that,’ said the culprit; ‘it’s a form, they

all do it, the man seemed to understand, we had a great deal of fun over

the name—’

He paused at that, for he saw his father wince at the picture like a man

physically struck; and again there was silence.

‘I do not think,’ said Mr. Nicholson, at last, ‘that I am an ungenerous

father. I have never grudged you money within reason, for any avowable

purpose; you had just to come to me and speak. And now I find that you

have forgotten all decency and all natural feeling, and actually

pawned—pawned—your mother’s watch. You must have had some temptation; I

will do you the justice to suppose it was a strong one. What did you

want with this money?’

‘I would rather not tell you, sir,’ said John. ‘It will only make you

angry.’

‘I will not be fenced with,’ cried his father. ‘There must be an end of

disingenuous answers. What did you want with this money?’

‘To lend it to Houston, sir,’ says John.

‘I thought I had forbidden you to speak to that young man?’ asked the

father.

‘Yes, sir,’ said John; ‘but I only met him.’

‘Where?’ came the deadly question.

And ‘In a billiard-room’ was the damning answer. Thus, had John’s single

departure from the truth brought instant punishment. For no other

purpose but to see Alan would he have entered a billiard-room; but he had

desired to palliate the fact of his disobedience, and now it appeared

that he frequented these disreputable haunts upon his own account.

Once more Mr. Nicholson digested the vile tidings in silence, and when

John stole a glance at his father’s countenance, he was abashed to see

the marks of suffering.

‘Well,’ said the old gentleman, at last, ‘I cannot pretend not to be

simply bowed down. I rose this morning what the world calls a happy

man—happy, at least, in a son of whom I thought I could be reasonably

proud—’

But it was beyond human nature to endure this longer, and John

interrupted almost with a scream. ‘Oh, wheest!’ he cried, ‘that’s not

all, that’s not the worst of it—it’s nothing! How could I tell you were

proud of me? Oh! I wish, I wish that I had known; but you always said I

was such a disgrace! And the dreadful thing is this: we were all taken

up last night, and we have to pay Colette’s fine among the six, or we’ll

be had up for evidence—shebeening it is. They made me swear to tell you;

but for my part,’ he cried, bursting into tears, ‘I just wish that I was

dead!’ And he fell on his knees before a chair and hid his face.

Whether his father spoke, or whether he remained long in the room or at

once departed, are points lost to history. A horrid turmoil of mind and

body; bursting sobs; broken, vanishing thoughts, now of indignation, now

of remorse; broken elementary whiffs of consciousness, of the smell of

the horse-hair on the chair bottom, of the jangling of church bells that

now began to make day horrible throughout the confines of the city, of

the hard floor that bruised his knees, of the taste of tears that found

their way into his mouth: for a period of time, the duration of which I

cannot guess, while I refuse to dwell longer on its agony, these were the

whole of God’s world for John Nicholson.

When at last, as by the touching of a spring, he returned again to

clearness of consciousness and even a measure of composure, the bells had

but just done ringing, and the Sabbath silence was still marred by the

patter of belated feet. By the clock above the fire, as well as by these

more speaking signs, the service had not long begun; and the unhappy

sinner, if his father had really gone to church, might count on near two

hours of only comparative unhappiness. With his father, the superlative

degree returned infallibly. He knew it by every shrinking fibre in his

body, he knew it by the sudden dizzy whirling of his brain, at the mere

thought of that calamity. An hour and a half, perhaps an hour and

three-quarters, if the doctor was long-winded, and then would begin again

that active agony from which, even in the dull ache of the present, he

shrunk as from the bite of fire. He saw, in a vision, the family pew,

the somnolent cushions, the Bibles, the psalm-books, Maria with her

smelling-salts, his father sitting spectacled and critical; and at once

he was struck with indignation, not unjustly. It was inhuman to go off

to church, and leave a sinner in suspense, unpunished, unforgiven. And

at the very touch of criticism, the paternal sanctity was lessened; yet

the paternal terror only grew; and the two strands of feeling pushed him

in the same direction.

And suddenly there came upon him a mad fear lest his father should have

locked him in. The notion had no ground in sense; it was probably no

more than a reminiscence of similar calamities in childhood, for his

father’s room had always been the chamber of inquisition and the scene of

punishment; but it stuck so rigorously in his mind that he must instantly

approach the door and prove its untruth. As he went, he struck upon a

drawer left open in the business table. It was the money-drawer, a

measure of his father’s disarray: the money-drawer—perhaps a pointing

providence! Who is to decide, when even divines differ between a

providence and a temptation? or who, sitting calmly under his own vine,

is to pass a judgment on the doings of a poor, hunted dog, slavishly

afraid, slavishly rebellious, like John Nicholson on that particular

Sunday? His hand was in the drawer, almost before his mind had conceived

the hope; and rising to his new situation, he wrote, sitting in his

father’s chair and using his father’s blotting-pad, his pitiful apology

and farewell:—

‘MY DEAR FATHER,—I have taken the money, but I will pay it back as

soon as I am able. You will never hear of me again. I did not mean

any harm by anything, so I hope you will try and forgive me. I wish

you would say good-bye to Alexander and Maria, but not if you don’t

want to. I could not wait to see you, really. Please try to forgive

me. Your affectionate son,

JOHN NICHOLSON.’

The coins abstracted and the missive written, he could not be gone too

soon from the scene of these transgressions; and remembering how his

father had once returned from church, on some slight illness, in the

middle of the second psalm, he durst not even make a packet of a change

of clothes. Attired as he was, he slipped from the paternal doors, and

found himself in the cool spring air, the thin spring sunshine, and the

great Sabbath quiet of the city, which was now only pointed by the cawing

of the rooks. There was not a soul in Randolph Crescent, nor a soul in

Queensferry Street; in this outdoor privacy and the sense of escape, John

took heart again; and with a pathetic sense of leave-taking, he even

ventured up the lane and stood awhile, a strange peri at the gates of a

quaint paradise, by the west end of St. George’s Church. They were

singing within; and by a strange chance, the tune was ‘St. George’s,

Edinburgh,’ which bears the name, and was first sung in the choir of that

church. ‘Who is this King of Glory?’ went the voices from within; and,

to John, this was like the end of all Christian observances, for he was

now to be a wild man like Ishmael, and his life was to be cast in

homeless places and with godless people.

It was thus, with no rising sense of the adventurous, but in mere

desolation and despair, that he turned his back on his native city, and

set out on foot for California, with a more immediate eye to Glasgow.

CHAPTER IV—THE SECOND SOWING

IT is no part of mine to narrate the adventures of John Nicholson, which

were many, but simply his more momentous misadventures, which were more

than he desired, and, by human standards, more than he deserved; how he

reached California, how he was rooked, and robbed, and beaten, and

starved; how he was at last taken up by charitable folk, restored to some

degree of self-complacency, and installed as a clerk in a bank in San

Francisco, it would take too long to tell; nor in these episodes were

there any marks of the peculiar Nicholsonic destiny, for they were just

such matters as befell some thousands of other young adventurers in the

same days and places. But once posted in the bank, he fell for a time

into a high degree of good fortune, which, as it was only a longer way

about to fresh disaster, it behooves me to explain.

It was his luck to meet a young man in what is technically called a

‘dive,’ and thanks to his monthly wages, to extricate this new

acquaintance from a position of present disgrace and possible danger in

the future. This young man was the nephew of one of the Nob Hill

magnates, who run the San Francisco Stock Exchange, much as more humble

adventurers, in the corner of some public park at home, may be seen to

perform the simple artifice of pea and thimble: for their own profit,

that is to say, and the discouragement of public gambling. It was thus

in his power—and, as he was of grateful temper, it was among the things

that he desired—to put John in the way of growing rich; and thus, without

thought or industry, or so much as even understanding the game at which

he played, but by simply buying and selling what he was told to buy and

sell, that plaything of fortune was presently at the head of between

eleven and twelve thousand pounds, or, as he reckoned it, of upward of

sixty thousand dollars.

How he had come to deserve this wealth, any more than how he had formerly

earned disgrace at home, was a problem beyond the reach of his

philosophy. It was true that he had been industrious at the bank, but no

more so than the cashier, who had seven small children and was visibly

sinking in decline. Nor was the step which had determined his advance—a

visit to a dive with a month’s wages in his pocket—an act of such

transcendent virtue, or even wisdom, as to seem to merit the favour of

the gods. From some sense of this, and of the dizzy see-saw—heaven-high,

hell-deep—on which men sit clutching; or perhaps fearing that the sources

of his fortune might be insidiously traced to some root in the field of

petty cash; he stuck to his work, said not a word of his new

circumstances, and kept his account with a bank in a different quarter of

the town. The concealment, innocent as it seems, was the first step in

the second tragicomedy of John’s existence.

Meanwhile, he had never written home. Whether from diffidence or shame,

or a touch of anger, or mere procrastination, or because (as we have

seen) he had no skill in literary arts, or because (as I am sometimes

tempted to suppose) there is a law in human nature that prevents young

men—not otherwise beasts—from the performance of this simple act of

piety—months and years had gone by, and John had never written. The

habit of not writing, indeed, was already fixed before he had begun to

come into his fortune; and it was only the difficulty of breaking this

long silence that withheld him from an instant restitution of the money

he had stolen or (as he preferred to call it) borrowed. In vain he sat

before paper, attending on inspiration; that heavenly nymph, beyond

suggesting the words ‘my dear father,’ remained obstinately silent; and

presently John would crumple up the sheet and decide, as soon as he had

‘a good chance,’ to carry the money home in person. And this delay,

which is indefensible, was his second step into the snares of fortune.

Ten years had passed, and John was drawing near to thirty. He had kept

the promise of his boyhood, and was now of a lusty frame, verging toward

corpulence; good features, good eyes, a genial manner, a ready laugh, a

long pair of sandy whiskers, a dash of an American accent, a close

familiarity with the great American joke, and a certain likeness to a

R-y-l P-rs-n-ge, who shall remain nameless for me, made up the man’s

externals as he could be viewed in society. Inwardly, in spite of his

gross body and highly masculine whiskers, he was more like a maiden lady

than a man of twenty-nine.

It chanced one day, as he was strolling down Market Street on the eve of

his fortnight’s holiday, that his eye was caught by certain railway

bills, and in very idleness of mind he calculated that he might be home

for Christmas if he started on the morrow. The fancy thrilled him with

desire, and in one moment he decided he would go.

There was much to be done: his portmanteau to be packed, a credit to be

got from the bank where he was a wealthy customer, and certain offices to

be transacted for that other bank in which he was an humble clerk; and it

chanced, in conformity with human nature, that out of all this business

it was the last that came to be neglected. Night found him, not only

equipped with money of his own, but once more (as on that former

occasion) saddled with a considerable sum of other people’s.

Now it chanced there lived in the same boarding-house a fellow-clerk of

his, an honest fellow, with what is called a weakness for drink—though it

might, in this case, have been called a strength, for the victim had been

drunk for weeks together without the briefest intermission. To this

unfortunate John intrusted a letter with an inclosure of bonds, addressed

to the bank manager. Even as he did so he thought he perceived a certain

haziness of eye and speech in his trustee; but he was too hopeful to be

stayed, silenced the voice of warning in his bosom, and with one and the

same gesture committed the money to the clerk, and himself into the hands

of destiny.

I dwell, even at the risk of tedium, on John’s minutest errors, his case

being so perplexing to the moralist; but we have done with them now, the

roll is closed, the reader has the worst of our poor hero, and I leave

him to judge for himself whether he or John has been the less deserving.

Henceforth we have to follow the spectacle of a man who was a mere

whip-top for calamity; on whose unmerited misadventures not even the

humourist can look without pity, and not even the philosopher without

alarm.

That same night the clerk entered upon a bout of drunkenness so

consistent as to surprise even his intimate acquaintance. He was

speedily ejected from the boarding-house; deposited his portmanteau with

a perfect stranger, who did not even catch his name; wandered he knew not

where, and was at last hove-to, all standing, in a hospital at

Sacramento. There, under the impenetrable _alias_ of the number of his

bed, the crapulous being lay for some more days unconscious of all

things, and of one thing in particular: that the police were after him.

Two months had come and gone before the convalescent in the Sacramento

hospital was identified with Kirkman, the absconding San Francisco clerk;

even then, there must elapse nearly a fortnight more till the perfect

stranger could be hunted up, the portmanteau recovered, and John’s letter

carried at length to its destination, the seal still unbroken, the

inclosure still intact.

Meanwhile, John had gone upon his holidays without a word, which was

irregular; and there had disappeared with him a certain sum of money,

which was out of all bounds of palliation. But he was known to be

careless, and believed to be honest; the manager besides had a regard for

him; and little was said, although something was no doubt thought, until

the fortnight was finally at an end, and the time had come for John to

reappear. Then, indeed, the affair began to look black; and when

inquiries were made, and the penniless clerk was found to have amassed

thousands of dollars, and kept them secretly in a rival establishment,

the stoutest of his friends abandoned him, the books were overhauled for

traces of ancient and artful fraud, and though none were found, there

still prevailed a general impression of loss. The telegraph was set in

motion; and the correspondent of the bank in Edinburgh, for which place

it was understood that John had armed himself with extensive credits, was

warned to communicate with the police.

Now this correspondent was a friend of Mr. Nicholson’s; he was well

acquainted with the tale of John’s calamitous disappearance from

Edinburgh; and putting one thing with another, hasted with the first word

of this scandal, not to the police, but to his friend. The old gentleman

had long regarded his son as one dead; John’s place had been taken, the

memory of his faults had already fallen to be one of those old aches,

which awaken again indeed upon occasion, but which we can always vanquish

by an effort of the will; and to have the long lost resuscitated in a

fresh disgrace was doubly bitter.

‘Macewen,’ said the old man, ‘this must be hushed up, if possible. If I

give you a cheek for this sum, about which they are certain, could you

take it on yourself to let the matter rest?’

‘I will,’ said Macewen. ‘I will take the risk of it.’

‘You understand,’ resumed Mr. Nicholson, speaking precisely, but with

ashen lips, ‘I do this for my family, not for that unhappy young man. If

it should turn out that these suspicions are correct, and he has

embezzled large sums, he must lie on his bed as he has made it.’ And

then looking up at Macewen with a nod, and one of his strange smiles:

‘Good-bye,’ said he, and Macewen, perceiving the case to be too grave for

consolation, took himself off, and blessed God on his way home that he

was childless.

CHAPTER V—THE PRODIGAL’S RETURN

BY a little after noon on the eve of Christmas, John had left his

portmanteau in the cloak-room, and stepped forth into Princes Street with

a wonderful expansion of the soul, such as men enjoy on the completion of

long-nourished schemes. He was at home again, incognito and rich;

presently he could enter his father’s house by means of the pass-key,

which he had piously preserved through all his wanderings; he would throw

down the borrowed money; there would be a reconciliation, the details of

which he frequently arranged; and he saw himself, during the next month,

made welcome in many stately houses at many frigid dinner-parties, taking

his share in the conversation with the freedom of the man and the

traveller, and laying down the law upon finance with the authority of the

successful investor. But this programme was not to be begun before

evening—not till just before dinner, indeed, at which meal the

reassembled family were to sit roseate, and the best wine, the modern

fatted calf, should flow for the prodigal’s return.

Meanwhile he walked familiar streets, merry reminiscences crowding round

him, sad ones also, both with the same surprising pathos. The keen

frosty air; the low, rosy, wintry sun; the castle, hailing him like an

old acquaintance; the names of friends on door-plates; the sight of

friends whom he seemed to recognise, and whom he eagerly avoided, in the

streets; the pleasant chant of the north-country accent; the dome of St.

George’s reminding him of his last penitential moments in the lane, and

of that King of Glory whose name had echoed ever since in the saddest

corner of his memory; and the gutters where he had learned to slide, and

the shop where he had bought his skates, and the stones on which he had

trod, and the railings in which he had rattled his clachan as he went to

school; and all those thousand and one nameless particulars, which the

eye sees without noting, which the memory keeps indeed yet without

knowing, and which, taken one with another, build up for us the aspect of

the place that we call home: all these besieged him, as he went, with

both delight and sadness.

His first visit was for Houston, who had a house on Regent Terrace, kept

for him in old days by an aunt. The door was opened (to his surprise)

upon the chain, and a voice asked him from within what he wanted.

‘I want Mr. Houston—Mr. Alan Houston,’ said he.

‘And who are ye?’ said the voice.

‘This is most extraordinary,’ thought John; and then aloud he told his

name.

‘No’ young Mr. John?’ cried the voice, with a sudden increase of Scotch

accent, testifying to a friendlier feeling.

‘The very same,’ said John.

And the old butler removed his defences, remarking only ‘I thocht ye were

that man.’ But his master was not there; he was staying, it appeared, at

the house in Murrayfield; and though the butler would have been glad

enough to have taken his place and given all the news of the family,

John, struck with a little chill, was eager to be gone. Only, the door

was scarce closed again, before he regretted that he had not asked about

‘that man.’

He was to pay no more visits till he had seen his father and made all

well at home; Alan had been the only possible exception, and John had not

time to go as far as Murrayfield. But here he was on Regent Terrace;

there was nothing to prevent him going round the end of the hill, and

looking from without on the Mackenzies’ house. As he went, he reflected

that Flora must now be a woman of near his own age, and it was within the

bounds of possibility that she was married; but this dishonourable doubt

he dammed down.

There was the house, sure enough; but the door was of another colour, and

what was this—two door-plates? He drew nearer; the top one bore, with

dignified simplicity, the words, ‘Mr. Proudfoot’; the lower one was more

explicit, and informed the passer-by that here was likewise the abode of

‘Mr. J. A. Dunlop Proudfoot, Advocate.’ The Proudfoots must be rich, for

no advocate could look to have much business in so remote a quarter; and

John hated them for their wealth and for their name, and for the sake of

the house they desecrated with their presence. He remembered a Proudfoot

he had seen at school, not known: a little, whey-faced urchin, the

despicable member of some lower class. Could it be this abortion that

had climbed to be an advocate, and now lived in the birthplace of Flora

and the home of John’s tenderest memories? The chill that had first

seized upon him when he heard of Houston’s absence deepened and struck

inward. For a moment, as he stood under the doors of that estranged

house, and looked east and west along the solitary pavement of the Royal

Terrace, where not a cat was stirring, the sense of solitude and

desolation took him by the throat, and he wished himself in San

Francisco.

And then the figure he made, with his decent portliness, his whiskers,

the money in his purse, the excellent cigar that he now lighted, recurred

to his mind in consolatory comparison with that of a certain maddened lad

who, on a certain spring Sunday ten years before, and in the hour of

church-time silence, had stolen from that city by the Glasgow road. In

the face of these changes, it were impious to doubt fortune’s kindness.

All would be well yet; the Mackenzies would be found, Flora, younger and

lovelier and kinder than before; Alan would be found, and would have so

nicely discriminated his behaviour as to have grown, on the one hand,

into a valued friend of Mr. Nicholson’s, and to have remained, upon the

other, of that exact shade of joviality which John desired in his

companions. And so, once more, John fell to work discounting the

delightful future: his first appearance in the family pew; his first

visit to his uncle Greig, who thought himself so great a financier, and

on whose purblind Edinburgh eyes John was to let in the dazzling daylight

of the West; and the details in general of that unrivalled transformation

scene, in which he was to display to all Edinburgh a portly and

successful gentleman in the shoes of the derided fugitive.

The time began to draw near when his father would have returned from the

office, and it would be the prodigal’s cue to enter. He strolled

westward by Albany Street, facing the sunset embers, pleased, he knew not

why, to move in that cold air and indigo twilight, starred with

street-lamps. But there was one more disenchantment waiting him by the

way.

At the corner of Pitt Street he paused to light a fresh cigar; the vesta

threw, as he did so, a strong light upon his features, and a man of about

his own age stopped at sight of it.

‘I think your name must be Nicholson,’ said the stranger.

It was too late to avoid recognition; and besides, as John was now

actually on the way home, it hardly mattered, and he gave way to the

impulse of his nature.

‘Great Scott!’ he cried, ‘Beatson!’ and shook hands with warmth. It

scarce seemed he was repaid in kind.

‘So you’re home again?’ said Beatson. ‘Where have you been all this long

time?’

‘In the States,’ said John—‘California. I’ve made my pile though; and it

suddenly struck me it would be a noble scheme to come home for

Christmas.’

‘I see,’ said Beatson. ‘Well, I hope we’ll see something of you now

you’re here.’

‘Oh, I guess so,’ said John, a little frozen.

‘Well, ta-ta,’ concluded Beatson, and he shook hands again and went.

This was a cruel first experience. It was idle to blink facts: here was

John home again, and Beatson—Old Beatson—did not care a rush. He

recalled Old Beatson in the past—that merry and affectionate lad—and

their joint adventures and mishaps, the window they had broken with a

catapult in India Place, the escalade of the castle rock, and many

another inestimable bond of friendship; and his hurt surprise grew

deeper. Well, after all, it was only on a man’s own family that he could

count; blood was thicker than water, he remembered; and the net result of

this encounter was to bring him to the doorstep of his father’s house,

with tenderer and softer feelings.

The night had come; the fanlight over the door shone bright; the two

windows of the dining-room where the cloth was being laid, and the three

windows of the drawing-room where Maria would be waiting dinner, glowed

softlier through yellow blinds. It was like a vision of the past. All

this time of his absence life had gone forward with an equal foot, and

the fires and the gas had been lighted, and the meals spread, at the

accustomed hours. At the accustomed hour, too, the bell had sounded

thrice to call the family to worship. And at the thought, a pang of

regret for his demerit seized him; he remembered the things that were

good and that he had neglected, and the things that were evil and that he

had loved; and it was with a prayer upon his lips that he mounted the

steps and thrust the key into the key-hole.

He stepped into the lighted hall, shut the door softly behind him, and

stood there fixed in wonder. No surprise of strangeness could equal the

surprise of that complete familiarity. There was the bust of Chalmers

near the stair-railings, there was the clothes-brush in the accustomed

place; and there, on the hat-stand, hung hats and coats that must surely

be the same as he remembered. Ten years dropped from his life, as a pin

may slip between the fingers; and the ocean and the mountains, and the

mines, and crowded marts and mingled races of San Francisco, and his own

fortune and his own disgrace, became, for that one moment, the figures of

a dream that was over.

He took off his hat, and moved mechanically toward the stand; and there

he found a small change that was a great one to him. The pin that had

been his from boyhood, where he had flung his balmoral when he loitered

home from the Academy, and his first hat when he came briskly back from

college or the office—his pin was occupied. ‘They might have at least

respected my pin!’ he thought, and he was moved as by a slight, and began

at once to recollect that he was here an interloper, in a strange house,

which he had entered almost by a burglary, and where at any moment he

might be scandalously challenged.

He moved at once, his hat still in his hand, to the door of his father’s

room, opened it, and entered. Mr. Nicholson sat in the same place and

posture as on that last Sunday morning; only he was older, and greyer,

and sterner; and as he now glanced up and caught the eye of his son, a

strange commotion and a dark flush sprung into his face.

‘Father,’ said John, steadily, and even cheerfully, for this was a moment

against which he was long ago prepared, ‘father, here I am, and here is

the money that I took from you. I have come back to ask your

forgiveness, and to stay Christmas with you and the children.’

‘Keep your money,’ said the father, ‘and go!’

‘Father!’ cried John; ‘for God’s sake don’t receive me this way. I’ve

come for—’

‘Understand me,’ interrupted Mr. Nicholson; ‘you are no son of mine; and

in the sight of God, I wash my hands of you. One last thing I will tell

you; one warning I will give you; all is discovered, and you are being

hunted for your crimes; if you are still at large it is thanks to me; but

I have done all that I mean to do; and from this time forth I would not

raise one finger—not one finger—to save you from the gallows! And now,’

with a low voice of absolute authority, and a single weighty gesture of

the finger, ‘and now—go!’

CHAPTER VI—THE HOUSE AT MURRAYFIELD

HOW John passed the evening, in what windy confusion of mind, in what

squalls of anger and lulls of sick collapse, in what pacing of streets

and plunging into public-houses, it would profit little to relate. His

misery, if it were not progressive, yet tended in no way to diminish; for

in proportion as grief and indignation abated, fear began to take their

place. At first, his father’s menacing words lay by in some safe drawer

of memory, biding their hour. At first, John was all thwarted affection

and blighted hope; next bludgeoned vanity raised its head again, with

twenty mortal gashes: and the father was disowned even as he had disowned

the son. What was this regular course of life, that John should have

admired it? what were these clock-work virtues, from which love was

absent? Kindness was the test, kindness the aim and soul; and judged by

such a standard, the discarded prodigal—now rapidly drowning his sorrows

and his reason in successive drams—was a creature of a lovelier morality

than his self-righteous father. Yes, he was the better man; he felt it,

glowed with the consciousness, and entering a public-house at the corner

of Howard Place (whither he had somehow wandered) he pledged his own

virtues in a glass—perhaps the fourth since his dismissal. Of that he

knew nothing, keeping no account of what he did or where he went; and in

the general crashing hurry of his nerves, unconscious of the approach of

intoxication. Indeed, it is a question whether he were really growing

intoxicated, or whether at first the spirits did not even sober him. For

it was even as he drained this last glass that his father’s ambiguous and

menacing words—popping from their hiding-place in memory—startled him

like a hand laid upon his shoulder. ‘Crimes, hunted, the gallows.’ They

were ugly words; in the ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the uglier;

for if some judicial error were in act against him, who should set a

limit to its grossness or to how far it might be pushed? Not John,

indeed; he was no believer in the powers of innocence, his cursed

experience pointing in quite other ways; and his fears, once wakened,

grew with every hour and hunted him about the city streets.

It was, perhaps, nearly nine at night; he had eaten nothing since lunch,

he had drunk a good deal, and he was exhausted by emotion, when the

thought of Houston came into his head. He turned, not merely to the man

as a friend, but to his house as a place of refuge. The danger that

threatened him was still so vague that he knew neither what to fear nor

where he might expect it; but this much at least seemed undeniable, that

a private house was safer than a public inn. Moved by these counsels, he

turned at once to the Caledonian Station, passed (not without alarm) into

the bright lights of the approach, redeemed his portmanteau from the

cloak-room, and was soon whirling in a cab along the Glasgow Road. The

change of movement and position, the sight of the lamps twinkling to the

rear, and the smell of damp and mould and rotten straw which clung about

the vehicle, wrought in him strange alternations of lucidity and mortal

giddiness.

‘I have been drinking,’ he discovered; ‘I must go straight to bed, and

sleep.’ And he thanked Heaven for the drowsiness that came upon his mind

in waves.

From one of these spells he was wakened by the stoppage of the cab; and,

getting down, found himself in quite a country road, the last lamp of the

suburb shining some way below, and the high walls of a garden rising

before him in the dark. The Lodge (as the place was named), stood,

indeed, very solitary. To the south it adjoined another house, but

standing in so large a garden as to be well out of cry; on all other

sides, open fields stretched upward to the woods of Corstorphine Hill, or

backward to the dells of Ravelston, or downward toward the valley of the

Leith. The effect of seclusion was aided by the great height of the

garden walls, which were, indeed, conventual, and, as John had tested in

former days, defied the climbing schoolboy. The lamp of the cab threw a

gleam upon the door and the not brilliant handle of the bell.

‘Shall I ring for ye?’ said the cabman, who had descended from his perch,

and was slapping his chest, for the night was bitter.

‘I wish you would,’ said John, putting his hand to his brow in one of his

accesses of giddiness.

The man pulled at the handle, and the clanking of the bell replied from

further in the garden; twice and thrice he did it, with sufficient

intervals; in the great frosty silence of the night the sounds fell sharp

and small.

‘Does he expect ye?’ asked the driver, with that manner of familiar

interest that well became his port-wine face; and when John had told him

no, ‘Well, then,’ said the cabman, ‘if ye’ll tak’ my advice of it, we’ll

just gang back. And that’s disinterested, mind ye, for my stables are in

the Glesgie Road.’

‘The servants must hear,’ said John.

‘Hout!’ said the driver. ‘He keeps no servants here, man. They’re a’ in

the town house; I drive him often; it’s just a kind of a hermitage,

this.’

‘Give me the bell,’ said John; and he plucked at it like a man desperate.

The clamour had not yet subsided before they heard steps upon the gravel,

and a voice of singular nervous irritability cried to them through the

door, ‘Who are you, and what do you want?’

‘Alan,’ said John, ‘it’s me—it’s Fatty—John, you know. I’m just come

home, and I’ve come to stay with you.’

There was no reply for a moment, and then the door was opened.

‘Get the portmanteau down,’ said John to the driver.

‘Do nothing of the kind,’ said Alan; and then to John, ‘Come in here a

moment. I want to speak to you.’

John entered the garden, and the door was closed behind him. A candle

stood on the gravel walk, winking a little in the draughts; it threw

inconstant sparkles on the clumped holly, struck the light and darkness

to and fro like a veil on Alan’s features, and sent his shadow hovering

behind him. All beyond was inscrutable; and John’s dizzy brain rocked

with the shadow. Yet even so, it struck him that Alan was pale, and his

voice, when he spoke, unnatural.

‘What brings you here to-night?’ he began. ‘I don’t want, God knows, to

seem unfriendly; but I cannot take you in, Nicholson; I cannot do it.’

‘Alan,’ said John, ‘you’ve just got to! You don’t know the mess I’m in;

the governor’s turned me out, and I daren’t show my face in an inn,

because they’re down on me for murder or something!’

‘For what?’ cried Alan, starting.

‘Murder, I believe,’ says John.

‘Murder!’ repeated Alan, and passed his hand over his eyes. ‘What was

that you were saying?’ he asked again.

‘That they were down on me,’ said John. ‘I’m accused of murder, by what

I can make out; and I’ve really had a dreadful day of it, Alan, and I

can’t sleep on the roadside on a night like this—at least, not with a

portmanteau,’ he pleaded.

‘Hush!’ said Alan, with his head on one side; and then, ‘Did you hear

nothing?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said John, thrilling, he knew not why, with communicated terror.

‘No, I heard nothing; why?’ And then, as there was no answer, he

reverted to his pleading: ‘But I say, Alan, you’ve just got to take me

in. I’ll go right away to bed if you have anything to do. I seem to

have been drinking; I was that knocked over. I wouldn’t turn you away,

Alan, if you were down on your luck.’

‘No?’ returned Alan. ‘Neither will you, then. Come and let’s get your

portmanteau.’

The cabman was paid, and drove off down the long, lamp-lighted hill, and

the two friends stood on the side-walk beside the portmanteau till the

last rumble of the wheels had died in silence. It seemed to John as

though Alan attached importance to this departure of the cab; and John,

who was in no state to criticise, shared profoundly in the feeling.

When the stillness was once more perfect, Alan shouldered the

portmanteau, carried it in, and shut and locked the garden door; and

then, once more, abstraction seemed to fall upon him, and he stood with

his hand on the key, until the cold began to nibble at John’s fingers.

‘Why are we standing here?’ asked John.

‘Eh?’ said Alan, blankly.

‘Why, man, you don’t seem yourself,’ said the other.

‘No, I’m not myself,’ said Alan; and he sat down on the portmanteau and

put his face in his hands.

John stood beside him swaying a little, and looking about him at the

swaying shadows, the flitting sparkles, and the steady stars overhead,

until the windless cold began to touch him through his clothes on the

bare skin. Even in his bemused intelligence, wonder began to awake.

‘I say, let’s come on to the house,’ he said at last.

‘Yes, let’s come on to the house,’ repeated Alan.

And he rose at once, reshouldered the portmanteau, and taking the candle

in his other hand, moved forward to the Lodge. This was a long, low

building, smothered in creepers; and now, except for some chinks of light

between the dining-room shutters, it was plunged in darkness and silence.

In the hall Alan lighted another candle, gave it to John, and opened the

door of a bedroom.

‘Here,’ said he; ‘go to bed. Don’t mind me, John. You’ll be sorry for

me when you know.’

‘Wait a bit,’ returned John; ‘I’ve got so cold with all that standing

about. Let’s go into the dining-room a minute. Just one glass to warm

me, Alan.’

On the table in the hall stood a glass, and a bottle with a whisky label

on a tray. It was plain the bottle had been just opened, for the cork

and corkscrew lay beside it.

‘Take that,’ said Alan, passing John the whisky, and then with a certain

roughness pushed his friend into the bedroom, and closed the door behind

him.

John stood amazed; then he shook the bottle, and, to his further wonder,

found it partly empty. Three or four glasses were gone. Alan must have

uncorked a bottle of whisky and drank three or four glasses one after the

other, without sitting down, for there was no chair, and that in his own

cold lobby on this freezing night! It fully explained his

eccentricities, John reflected sagely, as he mixed himself a grog. Poor

Alan! He was drunk; and what a dreadful thing was drink, and what a

slave to it poor Alan was, to drink in this unsociable, uncomfortable

fashion! The man who would drink alone, except for health’s sake—as John

was now doing—was a man utterly lost. He took the grog out, and felt

hazier, but warmer. It was hard work opening the portmanteau and finding

his night things; and before he was undressed, the cold had struck home

to him once more. ‘Well,’ said he; ‘just a drop more. There’s no sense

in getting ill with all this other trouble.’ And presently dreamless

slumber buried him.

When John awoke it was day. The low winter sun was already in the

heavens, but his watch had stopped, and it was impossible to tell the

hour exactly. Ten, he guessed it, and made haste to dress, dismal

reflections crowding on his mind. But it was less from terror than from

regret that he now suffered; and with his regret there were mingled

cutting pangs of penitence. There had fallen upon him a blow, cruel,

indeed, but yet only the punishment of old misdoing; and he had rebelled

and plunged into fresh sin. The rod had been used to chasten, and he had

bit the chastening fingers. His father was right; John had justified

him; John was no guest for decent people’s houses, and no fit associate

for decent people’s children. And had a broader hint been needed, there

was the case of his old friend. John was no drunkard, though he could at

times exceed; and the picture of Houston drinking neat spirits at his

hall-table struck him with something like disgust. He hung back from

meeting his old friend. He could have wished he had not come to him; and

yet, even now, where else was he to turn?

These musings occupied him while he dressed, and accompanied him into the

lobby of the house. The door stood open on the garden; doubtless, Alan

had stepped forth; and John did as he supposed his friend had done. The

ground was hard as iron, the frost still rigorous; as he brushed among

the hollies, icicles jingled and glittered in their fall; and wherever he

went, a volley of eager sparrows followed him. Here were Christmas

weather and Christmas morning duly met, to the delight of children. This

was the day of reunited families, the day to which he had so long looked

forward, thinking to awake in his own bed in Randolph Crescent,

reconciled with all men and repeating the footprints of his youth; and

here he was alone, pacing the alleys of a wintry garden and filled with

penitential thoughts.

And that reminded him: why was he alone? and where was Alan? The thought

of the festal morning and the due salutations reawakened his desire for

his friend, and he began to call for him by name. As the sound of his

voice died away, he was aware of the greatness of the silence that

environed him. But for the twittering of the sparrows and the crunching

of his own feet upon the frozen snow, the whole windless world of air

hung over him entranced, and the stillness weighed upon his mind with a

horror of solitude.

Still calling at intervals, but now with a moderated voice, he made the

hasty circuit of the garden, and finding neither man nor trace of man in

all its evergreen coverts, turned at last to the house. About the house

the silence seemed to deepen strangely. The door, indeed, stood open as

before; but the windows were still shuttered, the chimneys breathed no

stain into the bright air, there sounded abroad none of that low stir

(perhaps audible rather to the ear of the spirit than to the ear of the

flesh) by which a house announces and betrays its human lodgers. And yet

Alan must be there—Alan locked in drunken slumbers, forgetful of the

return of day, of the holy season, and of the friend whom he had so

coldly received and was now so churlishly neglecting. John’s disgust

redoubled at the thought, but hunger was beginning to grow stronger than

repulsion, and as a step to breakfast, if nothing else, he must find and

arouse this sleeper.

He made the circuit of the bedroom quarters. All, until he came to

Alan’s chamber, were locked from without, and bore the marks of a

prolonged disuse. But Alan’s was a room in commission, filled with

clothes, knickknacks, letters, books, and the conveniences of a solitary

man. The fire had been lighted; but it had long ago burned out, and the

ashes were stone cold. The bed had been made, but it had not been slept

in.

Worse and worse, then; Alan must have fallen where he sat, and now

sprawled brutishly, no doubt, upon the dining-room floor.

The dining-room was a very long apartment, and was reached through a

passage; so that John, upon his entrance, brought but little light with

him, and must move toward the windows with spread arms, groping and

knocking on the furniture. Suddenly he tripped and fell his length over

a prostrate body. It was what he had looked for, yet it shocked him; and

he marvelled that so rough an impact should not have kicked a groan out

of the drunkard. Men had killed themselves ere now in such excesses, a

dreary and degraded end that made John shudder. What if Alan were dead?

There would be a Christmas-day!

By this, John had his hand upon the shutters, and flinging them back,

beheld once again the blessed face of the day. Even by that light the

room had a discomfortable air. The chairs were scattered, and one had

been overthrown; the table-cloth, laid as if for dinner, was twitched

upon one side, and some of the dishes had fallen to the floor. Behind

the table lay the drunkard, still unaroused, only one foot visible to

John.

But now that light was in the room, the worst seemed over; it was a

disgusting business, but not more than disgusting; and it was with no

great apprehension that John proceeded to make the circuit of the table:

his last comparatively tranquil moment for that day. No sooner had he

turned the corner, no sooner had his eyes alighted on the body, than he

gave a smothered, breathless cry, and fled out of the room and out of the

house.

It was not Alan who lay there, but a man well up in years, of stern

countenance and iron-grey locks; and it was no drunkard, for the body lay

in a black pool of blood, and the open eyes stared upon the ceiling.

To and fro walked John before the door. The extreme sharpness of the air

acted on his nerves like an astringent, and braced them swiftly.

Presently, he not relaxing in his disordered walk, the images began to

come clearer and stay longer in his fancy; and next the power of thought

came back to him, and the horror and danger of his situation rooted him

to the ground.

He grasped his forehead, and staring on one spot of gravel, pieced

together what he knew and what he suspected. Alan had murdered some one:

possibly ‘that man’ against whom the butler chained the door in Regent

Terrace; possibly another; some one at least: a human soul, whom it was

death to slay and whose blood lay spilled upon the floor. This was the

reason of the whisky drinking in the passage, of his unwillingness to

welcome John, of his strange behaviour and bewildered words; this was why

he had started at and harped upon the name of murder; this was why he had

stood and hearkened, or sat and covered his eyes, in the black night.

And now he was gone, now he had basely fled; and to all his perplexities

and dangers John stood heir.

‘Let me think—let me think,’ he said, aloud, impatiently, even

pleadingly, as if to some merciless interrupter. In the turmoil of his

wits, a thousand hints and hopes and threats and terrors dinning

continuously in his ears, he was like one plunged in the hubbub of a

crowd. How was he to remember—he, who had not a thought to spare—that he

was himself the author, as well as the theatre, of so much confusion?

But in hours of trial the junto of man’s nature is dissolved, and anarchy

succeeds.

It was plain he must stay no longer where he was, for here was a new

Judicial Error in the very making. It was not so plain where he must go,

for the old Judicial Error, vague as a cloud, appeared to fill the

habitable world; whatever it might be, it watched for him, full-grown, in

Edinburgh; it must have had its birth in San Francisco; it stood guard,

no doubt, like a dragon, at the bank where he should cash his credit; and

though there were doubtless many other places, who should say in which of

them it was not ambushed? No, he could not tell where he was to go; he

must not lose time on these insolubilities. Let him go back to the

beginning. It was plain he must stay no longer where he was. It was

plain, too, that he must not flee as he was, for he could not carry his

portmanteau, and to flee and leave it was to plunge deeper in the mire.

He must go, leave the house unguarded, find a cab, and return—return

after an absence? Had he courage for that?

And just then he spied a stain about a hand’s-breadth on his trouser-leg,

and reached his finger down to touch it. The finger was stained red: it

was blood; he stared upon it with disgust, and awe, and terror, and in

the sharpness of the new sensation, fell instantly to act.

He cleansed his finger in the snow, returned into the house, drew near

with hushed footsteps to the dining-room door, and shut and locked it.

Then he breathed a little freer, for here at least was an oaken barrier

between himself and what he feared. Next, he hastened to his room, tore

off the spotted trousers which seemed in his eyes a link to bind him to

the gallows, flung them in a corner, donned another pair, breathlessly

crammed his night things into his portmanteau, locked it, swung it with

an effort from the ground, and with a rush of relief, came forth again

under the open heavens.

The portmanteau, being of occidental build, was no feather-weight; it had

distressed the powerful Alan; and as for John, he was crushed under its

bulk, and the sweat broke upon him thickly. Twice he must set it down to

rest before he reached the gate; and when he had come so far, he must do

as Alan did, and take his seat upon one corner. Here then, he sat a

while and panted; but now his thoughts were sensibly lightened; now, with

the trunk standing just inside the door, some part of his dissociation

from the house of crime had been effected, and the cabman need not pass

the garden wall. It was wonderful how that relieved him; for the house,

in his eyes, was a place to strike the most cursory beholder with

suspicion, as though the very windows had cried murder.

But there was to be no remission of the strokes of fate. As he thus sat,

taking breath in the shadow of the wall and hopped about by sparrows, it

chanced that his eye roved to the fastening of the door; and what he saw

plucked him to his feet. The thing locked with a spring; once the door

was closed, the bolt shut of itself; and without a key, there was no

means of entering from without.

He saw himself obliged to one of two distasteful and perilous

alternatives; either to shut the door altogether and set his portmanteau

out upon the wayside, a wonder to all beholders; or to leave the door

ajar, so that any thievish tramp or holiday schoolboy might stray in and

stumble on the grisly secret. To the last, as the least desperate, his

mind inclined; but he must first insure himself that he was unobserved.

He peered out, and down the long road; it lay dead empty. He went to the

corner of the by-road that comes by way of Dean; there also not a

passenger was stirring. Plainly it was, now or never, the high tide of

his affairs; and he drew the door as close as he durst, slipped a pebble

in the chink, and made off downhill to find a cab.

Half-way down a gate opened, and a troop of Christmas children sallied

forth in the most cheerful humour, followed more soberly by a smiling

mother.

‘And this is Christmas-day!’ thought John; and could have laughed aloud

in tragic bitterness of heart.

CHAPTER VII—A TRAGI-COMEDY IN A CAB

IN front of Donaldson’s Hospital, John counted it good fortune to

perceive a cab a great way of, and by much shouting and waving of his

arm, to catch the notice of the driver. He counted it good fortune, for

the time was long to him till he should have done for ever with the

Lodge; and the further he must go to find a cab, the greater the chance

that the inevitable discovery had taken place, and that he should return

to find the garden full of angry neighbours. Yet when the vehicle drew

up he was sensibly chagrined to recognise the port-wine cabman of the

night before. ‘Here,’ he could not but reflect, ‘here is another link in

the Judicial Error.’

The driver, on the other hand, was pleased to drop again upon so liberal

a fare; and as he was a man—the reader must already have perceived—of

easy, not to say familiar, manners, he dropped at once into a vein of

friendly talk, commenting on the weather, on the sacred season, which

struck him chiefly in the light of a day of liberal gratuities, on the

chance which had reunited him to a pleasing customer, and on the fact

that John had been (as he was pleased to call it) visibly ‘on the randan’

the night before.

‘And ye look dreidful bad the-day, sir, I must say that,’ he continued.

‘There’s nothing like a dram for ye—if ye’ll take my advice of it; and

bein’ as it’s Christmas, I’m no’ saying,’ he added, with a fatherly

smile, ‘but what I would join ye mysel’.’

John had listened with a sick heart.

‘I’ll give you a dram when we’ve got through,’ said he, affecting a

sprightliness which sat on him most unhandsomely, ‘and not a drop till

then. Business first, and pleasure afterward.’

With this promise the jarvey was prevailed upon to clamber to his place

and drive, with hideous deliberation, to the door of the Lodge. There

were no signs as yet of any public emotion; only, two men stood not far

off in talk, and their presence, seen from afar, set John’s pulses

buzzing. He might have spared himself his fright, for the pair were lost

in some dispute of a theological complexion, and with lengthened upper

lip and enumerating fingers, pursued the matter of their difference, and

paid no heed to John.

But the cabman proved a thorn in the flesh.

Nothing would keep him on his perch; he must clamber down, comment upon

the pebble in the door (which he regarded as an ingenious but unsafe

device), help John with the portmanteau, and enliven matters with a flow

of speech, and especially of questions, which I thus condense:—

‘He’ll no’ be here himsel’, will he? No? Well, he’s an eccentric man—a

fair oddity—if ye ken the expression. Great trouble with his tenants,

they tell me. I’ve driven the fam’ly for years. I drove a cab at his

father’s waddin’. What’ll your name be?—I should ken your face.

Baigrey, ye say? There were Baigreys about Gilmerton; ye’ll be one of

that lot? Then this’ll be a friend’s portmantie, like? Why? Because

the name upon it’s Nucholson! Oh, if ye’re in a hurry, that’s another

job. Waverley Brig? Are ye for away?’

So the friendly toper prated and questioned and kept John’s heart in a

flutter. But to this also, as to other evils under the sun, there came a

period; and the victim of circumstances began at last to rumble toward

the railway terminus at Waverley Bridge. During the transit, he sat with

raised glasses in the frosty chill and mouldy fetor of his chariot, and

glanced out sidelong on the holiday face of things, the shuttered shops,

and the crowds along the pavement, much as the rider in the Tyburn cart

may have observed the concourse gathering to his execution.

At the station his spirits rose again; another stage of his escape was

fortunately ended—he began to spy blue water. He called a railway

porter, and bade him carry the portmanteau to the cloak-room: not that he

had any notion of delay; flight, instant flight was his design, no matter

whither; but he had determined to dismiss the cabman ere he named, or

even chose, his destination, thus possibly balking the Judicial Error of

another link. This was his cunning aim, and now with one foot on the

roadway, and one still on the coach-step, he made haste to put the thing

in practice, and plunged his hand into his trousers pocket.

There was nothing there!

Oh yes; this time he was to blame. He should have remembered, and when

he deserted his blood-stained pantaloons, he should not have deserted

along with them his purse. Make the most of his error, and then compare

it with the punishment! Conceive his new position, for I lack words to

picture it; conceive him condemned to return to that house, from the very

thought of which his soul revolted, and once more to expose himself to

capture on the very scene of the misdeed: conceive him linked to the

mouldy cab and the familiar cabman. John cursed the cabman silently, and

then it occurred to him that he must stop the incarceration of his

portmanteau; that, at least, he must keep close at hand, and he turned to

recall the porter. But his reflections, brief as they had appeared, must

have occupied him longer than he supposed, and there was the man already

returning with the receipt.

Well, that was settled; he had lost his portmanteau also; for the

sixpence with which he had paid the Murrayfield Toll was one that had

strayed alone into his waistcoat pocket, and unless he once more

successfully achieved the adventure of the house of crime, his

portmanteau lay in the cloakroom in eternal pawn, for lack of a penny

fee. And then he remembered the porter, who stood suggestively

attentive, words of gratitude hanging on his lips.

John hunted right and left; he found a coin—prayed God that it was a

sovereign—drew it out, beheld a halfpenny, and offered it to the porter.

The man’s jaw dropped.

‘It’s only a halfpenny!’ he said, startled out of railway decency.

‘I know that,’ said John, piteously.

And here the porter recovered the dignity of man.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said he, and would have returned the base gratuity.

But John, too, would none of it; and as they struggled, who must join in

but the cabman?

‘Hoots, Mr. Baigrey,’ said he, ‘you surely forget what day it is!’

‘I tell you I have no change!’ cried John.

‘Well,’ said the driver, ‘and what then? I would rather give a man a

shillin’ on a day like this than put him off with a derision like a

bawbee. I’m surprised at the like of you, Mr. Baigrey!’

‘My name is not Baigrey!’ broke out John, in mere childish temper and

distress.

‘Ye told me it was yoursel’,’ said the cabman.

‘I know I did; and what the devil right had you to ask?’ cried the

unhappy one.

‘Oh, very well,’ said the driver. ‘I know my place, if you know yours—if

you know yours!’ he repeated, as one who should imply grave doubt; and

muttered inarticulate thunders, in which the grand old name of gentleman

was taken seemingly in vain.

Oh to have been able to discharge this monster, whom John now perceived,

with tardy clear-sightedness, to have begun betimes the festivities of

Christmas! But far from any such ray of consolation visiting the lost,

he stood bare of help and helpers, his portmanteau sequestered in one

place, his money deserted in another and guarded by a corpse; himself, so

sedulous of privacy, the cynosure of all men’s eyes about the station;

and, as if these were not enough mischances, he was now fallen in

ill-blood with the beast to whom his poverty had linked him! In

ill-blood, as he reflected dismally, with the witness who perhaps might

hang or save him! There was no time to be lost; he durst not linger any

longer in that public spot; and whether he had recourse to dignity or

conciliation, the remedy must be applied at once. Some happily surviving

element of manhood moved him to the former.

‘Let us have no more of this,’ said he, his foot once more upon the step.

‘Go back to where we came from.’

He had avoided the name of any destination, for there was now quite a

little band of railway folk about the cab, and he still kept an eye upon

the court of justice, and laboured to avoid concentric evidence. But

here again the fatal jarvey out-manoeuvred him.

‘Back to the Ludge?’ cried he, in shrill tones of protest.

‘Drive on at once!’ roared John, and slammed the door behind him, so that

the crazy chariot rocked and jingled.

Forth trundled the cab into the Christmas streets, the fare within

plunged in the blackness of a despair that neighboured on

unconsciousness, the driver on the box digesting his rebuke and his

customer’s duplicity. I would not be thought to put the pair in

competition; John’s case was out of all parallel. But the cabman, too,

is worth the sympathy of the judicious; for he was a fellow of genuine

kindliness and a high sense of personal dignity incensed by drink; and

his advances had been cruelly and publicly rebuffed. As he drove,

therefore, he counted his wrongs, and thirsted for sympathy and drink.

Now, it chanced he had a friend, a publican in Queensferry Street, from

whom, in view of the sacredness of the occasion, he thought he might

extract a dram. Queensferry Street lies something off the direct road to

Murrayfield. But then there is the hilly cross-road that passes by the

valley of the Leith and the Dean Cemetery; and Queensferry Street is on

the way to that. What was to hinder the cabman, since his horse was

dumb, from choosing the cross-road, and calling on his friend in passing?

So it was decided; and the charioteer, already somewhat mollified, turned

aside his horse to the right.

John, meanwhile, sat collapsed, his chin sunk upon his chest, his mind in

abeyance. The smell of the cab was still faintly present to his senses,

and a certain leaden chill about his feet, all else had disappeared in

one vast oppression of calamity and physical faintness. It was drawing

on to noon—two-and-twenty hours since he had broken bread; in the

interval, he had suffered tortures of sorrow and alarm, and been partly

tipsy; and though it was impossible to say he slept, yet when the cab

stopped and the cabman thrust his head into the window, his attention had

to be recalled from depths of vacancy.

‘If you’ll no’ _stand_ me a dram,’ said the driver, with a well-merited

severity of tone and manner, ‘I dare say ye’ll have no objection to my

taking one mysel’?’

‘Yes—no—do what you like,’ returned John; and then, as he watched his

tormentor mount the stairs and enter the whisky-shop, there floated into

his mind a sense as of something long ago familiar. At that he started

fully awake, and stared at the shop-fronts. Yes, he knew them; but when?

and how? Long since, he thought; and then, casting his eye through the

front glass, which had been recently occluded by the figure of the

jarvey, he beheld the tree-tops of the rookery in Randolph Crescent. He

was close to home—home, where he had thought, at that hour, to be sitting

in the well-remembered drawing-room in friendly converse; and, instead—!

It was his first impulse to drop into the bottom of the cab; his next, to

cover his face with his hands. So he sat, while the cabman toasted the

publican, and the publican toasted the cabman, and both reviewed the

affairs of the nation; so he still sat, when his master condescended to

return, and drive off at last down-hill, along the curve of Lynedoch

Place; but even so sitting, as he passed the end of his father’s street,

he took one glance from between shielding fingers, and beheld a doctor’s

carriage at the door.

‘Well, just so,’ thought he; ‘I’ll have killed my father! And this is

Christmas-day!’

If Mr. Nicholson died, it was down this same road he must journey to the

grave; and down this road, on the same errand, his wife had preceded him

years before; and many other leading citizens, with the proper trappings

and attendance of the end. And now, in that frosty, ill-smelling,

straw-carpeted, and ragged-cushioned cab, with his breath congealing on

the glasses, where else was John himself advancing to?

The thought stirred his imagination, which began to manufacture many

thousand pictures, bright and fleeting, like the shapes in a

kaleidoscope; and now he saw himself, ruddy and comfortered, sliding in

the gutter; and, again, a little woe-begone, bored urchin tricked forth

in crape and weepers, descending this same hill at the foot’s pace of

mourning coaches, his mother’s body just preceding him; and yet again,

his fancy, running far in front, showed him his destination—now standing

solitary in the low sunshine, with the sparrows hopping on the threshold

and the dead man within staring at the roof—and now, with a sudden

change, thronged about with white-faced, hand-uplifting neighbours, and

doctor bursting through their midst and fixing his stethoscope as he

went, the policeman shaking a sagacious head beside the body. It was to

this he feared that he was driving; in the midst of this he saw himself

arrive, heard himself stammer faint explanations, and felt the hand of

the constable upon his shoulder. Heavens! how he wished he had played

the manlier part; how he despised himself that he had fled that fatal

neighbourhood when all was quiet, and should now be tamely travelling

back when it was thronging with avengers!

Any strong degree of passion lends, even to the dullest, the forces of

the imagination. And so now as he dwelt on what was probably awaiting

him at the end of this distressful drive—John, who saw things little,

remembered them less, and could not have described them at all, beheld in

his mind’s-eye the garden of the Lodge, detailed as in a map; he went to

and fro in it, feeding his terrors; he saw the hollies, the snowy

borders, the paths where he had sought Alan, the high, conventual walls,

the shut door—what! was the door shut? Ay, truly, he had shut it—shut in

his money, his escape, his future life—shut it with these hands, and none

could now open it! He heard the snap of the spring-lock like something

bursting in his brain, and sat astonied.

And then he woke again, terror jarring through his vitals. This was no

time to be idle; he must be up and doing, he must think. Once at the end

of this ridiculous cruise, once at the Lodge door, there would be nothing

for it but to turn the cab and trundle back again. Why, then, go so far?

why add another feature of suspicion to a case already so suggestive? why

not turn at once? It was easy to say, turn; but whither? He had nowhere

now to go to; he could never—he saw it in letters of blood—he could never

pay that cab; he was saddled with that cab for ever. Oh that cab! his

soul yearned and burned, and his bowels sounded to be rid of it. He

forgot all other cares. He must first quit himself of this ill-smelling

vehicle and of the human beast that guided it—first do that; do that, at

least; do that at once.

And just then the cab suddenly stopped, and there was his persecutor

rapping on the front glass. John let it down, and beheld the port-wine

countenance inflamed with intellectual triumph.

‘I ken wha ye are!’ cried the husky voice. ‘I mind ye now. Ye’re a

Nucholson. I drove ye to Hermiston to a Christmas party, and ye came

back on the box, and I let ye drive.’

It is a fact. John knew the man; they had been even friends. His enemy,

he now remembered, was a fellow of great good nature—endless good

nature—with a boy; why not with a man? Why not appeal to his better

side? He grasped at the new hope.

‘Great Scott! and so you did,’ he cried, as if in a transport of delight,

his voice sounding false in his own ears. ‘Well, if that’s so, I’ve

something to say to you. I’ll just get out, I guess. Where are we, any

way?’

The driver had fluttered his ticket in the eyes of the branch-toll

keeper, and they were now brought to on the highest and most solitary

part of the by-road. On the left, a row of fieldside trees beshaded it;

on the right, it was bordered by naked fallows, undulating down-hill to

the Queensferry Road; in front, Corstorphine Hill raised its

snow-bedabbled, darkling woods against the sky. John looked all about

him, drinking the clear air like wine; then his eyes returned to the

cabman’s face as he sat, not ungleefully, awaiting John’s communication,

with the air of one looking to be tipped.

The features of that face were hard to read, drink had so swollen them,

drink had so painted them, in tints that varied from brick-red to

mulberry. The small grey eyes blinked, the lips moved, with greed; greed

was the ruling passion; and though there was some good nature, some

genuine kindliness, a true human touch, in the old toper, his greed was

now so set afire by hope, that all other traits of character lay dormant.

He sat there a monument of gluttonous desire.

John’s heart slowly fell. He had opened his lips, but he stood there and

uttered nought. He sounded the well of his courage, and it was dry. He

groped in his treasury of words, and it was vacant. A devil of dumbness

had him by the throat; the devil of terror babbled in his ears; and

suddenly, without a word uttered, with no conscious purpose formed in his

will, John whipped about, tumbled over the roadside wall, and began

running for his life across the fallows.

He had not gone far, he was not past the midst of the first afield, when

his whole brain thundered within him, ‘Fool! You have your watch!’ The

shock stopped him, and he faced once more toward the cab. The driver was

leaning over the wall, brandishing his whip, his face empurpled, roaring

like a bull. And John saw (or thought) that he had lost the chance. No

watch would pacify the man’s resentment now; he would cry for vengeance

also. John would be had under the eye of the police; his tale would be

unfolded, his secret plumbed, his destiny would close on him at last, and

for ever.

He uttered a deep sigh; and just as the cabman, taking heart of grace,

was beginning at last to scale the wall, his defaulting customer fell

again to running, and disappeared into the further fields.

CHAPTER VIII—SINGULAR INSTANCE OF THE UTILITY OF PASS-KEYS

WHERE he ran at first, John never very clearly knew; nor yet how long a

time elapsed ere he found himself in the by-road near the lodge of

Ravelston, propped against the wall, his lungs heaving like bellows, his

legs leaden-heavy, his mind possessed by one sole desire—to lie down and

be unseen. He remembered the thick coverts round the quarry-hole pond,

an untrodden corner of the world where he might surely find concealment

till the night should fall. Thither he passed down the lane; and when he

came there, behold! he had forgotten the frost, and the pond was alive

with young people skating, and the pond-side coverts were thick with

lookers-on. He looked on a while himself. There was one tall, graceful

maiden, skating hand in hand with a youth, on whom she bestowed her

bright eyes perhaps too patently; and it was strange with what anger John

beheld her. He could have broken forth in curses; he could have stood

there, like a mortified tramp, and shaken his fist and vented his gall

upon her by the hour—or so he thought; and the next moment his heart bled

for the girl. ‘Poor creature, it’s little she knows!’ he sighed. ‘Let

her enjoy herself while she can!’ But was it possible, when Flora used

to smile at him on the Braid ponds, she could have looked so fulsome to a

sick-hearted bystander?

The thought of one quarry, in his frozen wits, suggested another; and he

plodded off toward Craigleith. A wind had sprung up out of the

north-west; it was cruel keen, it dried him like a fire, and racked his

finger-joints. It brought clouds, too; pale, swift, hurrying clouds,

that blotted heaven and shed gloom upon the earth. He scrambled up among

the hazelled rubbish heaps that surround the caldron of the quarry, and

lay flat upon the stones. The wind searched close along the earth, the

stones were cutting and icy, the bare hazels wailed about him; and soon

the air of the afternoon began to be vocal with those strange and dismal

harpings that herald snow. Pain and misery turned in John’s limbs to a

harrowing impatience and blind desire of change; now he would roll in his

harsh lair, and when the flints abraded him, was almost pleased; now he

would crawl to the edge of the huge pit and look dizzily down. He saw

the spiral of the descending roadway, the steep crags, the clinging

bushes, the peppering of snow-wreaths, and far down in the bottom, the

diminished crane. Here, no doubt, was a way to end it. But it somehow

did not take his fancy.

And suddenly he was aware that he was hungry; ay, even through the

tortures of the cold, even through the frosts of despair, a gross,

desperate longing after food, no matter what, no matter how, began to

wake and spur him. Suppose he pawned his watch? But no, on

Christmas-day—this was Christmas-day!—the pawnshop would be closed.

Suppose he went to the public-house close by at Blackhall, and offered

the watch, which was worth ten pounds, in payment for a meal of bread and

cheese? The incongruity was too remarkable; the good folks would either

put him to the door, or only let him in to send for the police. He

turned his pockets out one after another; some San Francisco tram-car

checks, one cigar, no lights, the pass-key to his father’s house, a

pocket-handkerchief, with just a touch of scent: no, money could be

raised on none of these. There was nothing for it but to starve; and

after all, what mattered it? That also was a door of exit.

He crept close among the bushes, the wind playing round him like a lash;

his clothes seemed thin as paper, his joints burned, his skin curdled on

his bones. He had a vision of a high-lying cattle-drive in California,

and the bed of a dried stream with one muddy pool, by which the vaqueros

had encamped: splendid sun over all, the big bonfire blazing, the strips

of cow browning and smoking on a skewer of wood; how warm it was, how

savoury the steam of scorching meat! And then again he remembered his

manifold calamities, and burrowed and wallowed in the sense of his

disgrace and shame. And next he was entering Frank’s restaurant in

Montgomery Street, San Francisco; he had ordered a pan-stew and venison

chops, of which he was immoderately fond, and as he sat waiting, Munroe,

the good attendant, brought him a whisky punch; he saw the strawberries

float on the delectable cup, he heard the ice chink about the straws.

And then he woke again to his detested fate, and found himself sitting,

humped together, in a windy combe of quarry refuse—darkness thick about

him, thin flakes of snow flying here and there like rags of paper, and

the strong shuddering of his body clashing his teeth like a hiccough.

We have seen John in nothing but the stormiest condition; we have seen

him reckless, desperate, tried beyond his moderate powers; of his daily

self, cheerful, regular, not unthrifty, we have seen nothing; and it may

thus be a surprise to the reader to learn that he was studiously careful

of his health. This favourite preoccupation now awoke. If he were to

sit there and die of cold, there would be mighty little gained; better

the police cell and the chances of a jury trial, than the miserable

certainty of death at a dyke-side before the next winter’s dawn, or death

a little later in the gas-lighted wards of an infirmary.

He rose on aching legs, and stumbled here and there among the rubbish

heaps, still circumvented by the yawning crater of the quarry; or perhaps

he only thought so, for the darkness was already dense, the snow was

growing thicker, and he moved like a blind man, and with a blind man’s

terrors. At last he climbed a fence, thinking to drop into the road, and

found himself staggering, instead, among the iron furrows of a

ploughland, endless, it seemed, as a whole county. And next he was in a

wood, beating among young trees; and then he was aware of a house with

many lighted windows, Christmas carriages waiting at the doors, and

Christmas drivers (for Christmas has a double edge) becoming swiftly

hooded with snow. From this glimpse of human cheerfulness, he fled like

Cain; wandered in the night, unpiloted, careless of whither he went;

fell, and lay, and then rose again and wandered further; and at last,

like a transformation scene, behold him in the lighted jaws of the city,

staring at a lamp which had already donned the tilted night-cap of the

snow. It came thickly now, a ‘Feeding Storm’; and while he yet stood

blinking at the lamp, his feet were buried. He remembered something like

it in the past, a street-lamp crowned and caked upon the windward side

with snow, the wind uttering its mournful hoot, himself looking on, even

as now; but the cold had struck too sharply on his wits, and memory

failed him as to the date and sequel of the reminiscence.

His next conscious moment was on the Dean Bridge; but whether he was John

Nicholson of a bank in a California street, or some former John, a clerk

in his father’s office, he had now clean forgotten. Another blank, and

he was thrusting his pass-key into the door-lock of his father’s house.

Hours must have passed. Whether crouched on the cold stones or wandering

in the fields among the snow, was more than he could tell; but hours had

passed. The finger of the hall clock was close on twelve; a narrow peep

of gas in the hall-lamp shed shadows; and the door of the back room—his

father’s room—was open and emitted a warm light. At so late an hour, all

this was strange; the lights should have been out, the doors locked, the

good folk safe in bed. He marvelled at the irregularity, leaning on the

hall-table; and marvelled to himself there; and thawed and grew once more

hungry, in the warmer air of the house.

The clock uttered its premonitory catch; in five minutes Christmas-day

would be among the days of the past—Christmas!—what a Christmas! Well,

there was no use waiting; he had come into that house, he scarce knew

how; if they were to thrust him forth again, it had best be done at once;

and he moved to the door of the back room and entered.

Oh, well, then he was insane, as he had long believed.

There, in his father’s room, at midnight, the fire was roaring and the

gas blazing; the papers, the sacred papers—to lay a hand on which was

criminal—had all been taken off and piled along the floor; a cloth was

spread, and a supper laid, upon the business table; and in his father’s

chair a woman, habited like a nun, sat eating. As he appeared in the

doorway, the nun rose, gave a low cry, and stood staring. She was a

large woman, strong, calm, a little masculine, her features marked with

courage and good sense; and as John blinked back at her, a faint

resemblance dodged about his memory, as when a tune haunts us, and yet

will not be recalled.

‘Why, it’s John!’ cried the nun.

‘I dare say I’m mad,’ said John, unconsciously following King Lear; ‘but,

upon my word, I do believe you’re Flora.’

‘Of course I am,’ replied she.

And yet it is not Flora at all, thought John; Flora was slender, and

timid, and of changing colour, and dewy-eyed; and had Flora such an

Edinburgh accent? But he said none of these things, which was perhaps as

well. What he said was, ‘Then why are you a nun?’

‘Such nonsense!’ said Flora. ‘I’m a sick-nurse; and I am here nursing

your sister, with whom, between you and me, there is precious little the

matter. But that is not the question. The point is: How do you come

here? and are you not ashamed to show yourself?’

‘Flora,’ said John, sepulchrally, ‘I haven’t eaten anything for three

days. Or, at least, I don’t know what day it is; but I guess I’m

starving.’

‘You unhappy man!’ she cried. ‘Here, sit down and eat my supper; and

I’ll just run upstairs and see my patient; not but what I doubt she’s

fast asleep, for Maria is a _malade imaginaire_.’

With this specimen of the French, not of Stratford-atte-Bowe, but of a

finishing establishment in Moray Place, she left John alone in his

father’s sanctum. He fell at once upon the food; and it is to be

supposed that Flora had found her patient wakeful, and been detained with

some details of nursing, for he had time to make a full end of all there

was to eat, and not only to empty the teapot, but to fill it again from a

kettle that was fitfully singing on his father’s fire. Then he sat

torpid, and pleased, and bewildered; his misfortunes were then half

forgotten; his mind considering, not without regret, this unsentimental

return to his old love.

He was thus engaged, when that bustling woman noiselessly re-entered.

‘Have you eaten?’ said she. ‘Then tell me all about it.’

It was a long and (as the reader knows) a pitiful story; but Flora heard

it with compressed lips. She was lost in none of those questionings of

human destiny that have, from time to time, arrested the flight of my own

pen; for women, such as she, are no philosophers, and behold the concrete

only. And women, such as she, are very hard on the imperfect man.

‘Very well,’ said she, when he had done; ‘then down upon your knees at

once, and beg God’s forgiveness.’

And the great baby plumped upon his knees, and did as he was bid; and

none the worse for that! But while he was heartily enough requesting

forgiveness on general principles, the rational side of him

distinguished, and wondered if, perhaps, the apology were not due upon

the other part. And when he rose again from that becoming exercise, he

first eyed the face of his old love doubtfully, and then, taking heart,

uttered his protest.

‘I must say, Flora,’ said he, ‘in all this business, I can see very

little fault of mine.’

‘If you had written home,’ replied the lady, ‘there would have been none

of it. If you had even gone to Murrayfield reasonably sober, you would

never have slept there, and the worst would not have happened. Besides,

the whole thing began years ago. You got into trouble, and when your

father, honest man, was disappointed, you took the pet, or got afraid,

and ran away from punishment. Well, you’ve had your own way of it, John,

and I don’t suppose you like it.’

‘I sometimes fancy I’m not much better than a fool,’ sighed John.

‘My dear John,’ said she, ‘not much!’

He looked at her, and his eye fell. A certain anger rose within him;

here was a Flora he disowned; she was hard; she was of a set colour; a

settled, mature, undecorative manner; plain of speech, plain of habit—he

had come near saying, plain of face. And this changeling called herself

by the same name as the many-coloured, clinging maid of yore; she of the

frequent laughter, and the many sighs, and the kind, stolen glances. And

to make all worse, she took the upper hand with him, which (as John well

knew) was not the true relation of the sexes. He steeled his heart

against this sick-nurse.

‘And how do you come to be here?’ he asked.

She told him how she had nursed her father in his long illness, and when

he died, and she was left alone, had taken to nurse others, partly from

habit, partly to be of some service in the world; partly, it might be,

for amusement. ‘There’s no accounting for taste,’ said she. And she

told him how she went largely to the houses of old friends, as the need

arose; and how she was thus doubly welcome as an old friend first, and

then as an experienced nurse, to whom doctors would confide the gravest

cases.

‘And, indeed, it’s a mere farce my being here for poor Maria,’ she

continued; ‘but your father takes her ailments to heart, and I cannot

always be refusing him. We are great friends, your father and I; he was

very kind to me long ago—ten years ago.

A strange stir came in John’s heart. All this while had he been thinking

only of himself? All this while, why had he not written to Flora? In

penitential tenderness, he took her hand, and, to his awe and trouble, it

remained in his, compliant. A voice told him this was Flora, after

all—told him so quietly, yet with a thrill of singing.

‘And you never married?’ said he.

‘No, John; I never married,’ she replied.

The hall clock striking two recalled them to the sense of time.

‘And now,’ said she, ‘you have been fed and warmed, and I have heard your

story, and now it’s high time to call your brother.’

‘Oh!’ cried John, chap-fallen; ‘do you think that absolutely necessary?’

‘_I_ can’t keep you here; I am a stranger,’ said she. ‘Do you want to

run away again? I thought you had enough of that.’

He bowed his head under the reproof. She despised him, he reflected, as

he sat once more alone; a monstrous thing for a woman to despise a man;

and strangest of all, she seemed to like him. Would his brother despise

him, too? And would his brother like him?

And presently the brother appeared, under Flora’s escort; and, standing

afar off beside the doorway, eyed the hero of this tale.

‘So this is you?’ he said, at length.

‘Yes, Alick, it’s me—it’s John,’ replied the elder brother, feebly.

‘And how did you get in here?’ inquired the younger.

‘Oh, I had my pass-key,’ says John.

‘The deuce you had!’ said Alexander. ‘Ah, you lived in a better world!

There are no pass-keys going now.’

‘Well, father was always averse to them,’ sighed John. And the

conversation then broke down, and the brothers looked askance at one

another in silence.

‘Well, and what the devil are we to do?’ said Alexander. ‘I suppose if

the authorities got wind of you, you would be taken up?’

‘It depends on whether they’ve found the body or not,’ returned John.

‘And then there’s that cabman, to be sure!’

‘Oh, bother the body!’ said Alexander. ‘I mean about the other thing.

That’s serious.’

‘Is that what my father spoke about?’ asked John. ‘I don’t even know

what it is.’

‘About your robbing your bank in California, of course,’ replied

Alexander.

It was plain, from Flora’s face, that this was the first she had heard of

it; it was plainer still, from John’s, that he was innocent.

‘I!’ he exclaimed. ‘I rob my bank! My God! Flora, this is too much;

even you must allow that.’

‘Meaning you didn’t?’ asked Alexander.

‘I never robbed a soul in all my days,’ cried John: ‘except my father, if

you call that robbery; and I brought him back the money in this room, and

he wouldn’t even take it!’

‘Look here, John,’ said his brother, ‘let us have no misunderstanding

upon this. Macewen saw my father; he told him a bank you had worked for

in San Francisco was wiring over the habitable globe to have you

collared—that it was supposed you had nailed thousands; and it was dead

certain you had nailed three hundred. So Macewen said, and I wish you

would be careful how you answer. I may tell you also, that your father

paid the three hundred on the spot.’

‘Three hundred?’ repeated John. ‘Three hundred pounds, you mean? That’s

fifteen hundred dollars. Why, then, it’s Kirkman!’ he broke out. ‘Thank

Heaven! I can explain all that. I gave them to Kirkman to pay for me

the night before I left—fifteen hundred dollars, and a letter to the

manager. What do they suppose I would steal fifteen hundred dollars for?

I’m rich; I struck it rich in stocks. It’s the silliest stuff I ever

heard of. All that’s needful is to cable to the manager: Kirkman has the

fifteen hundred—find Kirkman. He was a fellow-clerk of mine, and a hard

case; but to do him justice, I didn’t think he was as hard as this.’

‘And what do you say to that, Alick?’ asked Flora.

‘I say the cablegram shall go to-night!’ cried Alexander, with energy.

‘Answer prepaid, too. If this can be cleared away—and upon my word I do

believe it can—we shall all be able to hold up our heads again. Here,

you John, you stick down the address of your bank manager. You, Flora,

you can pack John into my bed, for which I have no further use to-night.

As for me, I am off to the post-office, and thence to the High Street

about the dead body. The police ought to know, you see, and they ought

to know through John; and I can tell them some rigmarole about my brother

being a man of highly nervous organisation, and the rest of it. And

then, I’ll tell you what, John—did you notice the name upon the cab?’

John gave the name of the driver, which, as I have not been able to

command the vehicle, I here suppress.

‘Well,’ resumed Alexander, ‘I’ll call round at their place before I come

back, and pay your shot for you. In that way, before breakfast-time,

you’ll be as good as new.’

John murmured inarticulate thanks. To see his brother thus energetic in

his service moved him beyond expression; if he could not utter what he

felt, he showed it legibly in his face; and Alexander read it there, and

liked it the better in that dumb delivery.

‘But there’s one thing,’ said the latter, ‘cablegrams are dear; and I

dare say you remember enough of the governor to guess the state of my

finances.’

‘The trouble is,’ said John, ‘that all my stamps are in that beastly

house.’

‘All your what?’ asked Alexander.

‘Stamps—money,’ explained John. ‘It’s an American expression; I’m afraid

I contracted one or two.’

‘I have some,’ said Flora. ‘I have a pound note upstairs.’

‘My dear Flora,’ returned Alexander, ‘a pound note won’t see us very far;

and besides, this is my father’s business, and I shall be very much

surprised if it isn’t my father who pays for it.’

‘I would not apply to him yet; I do not think that can be wise,’ objected

Flora.

‘You have a very imperfect idea of my resources, and not at all of my

effrontery,’ replied Alexander. ‘Please observe.’

He put John from his way, chose a stout knife among the supper things,

and with surprising quickness broke into his father’s drawer.

‘There’s nothing easier when you come to try,’ he observed, pocketing the

money.

‘I wish you had not done that,’ said Flora. ‘You will never hear the

last of it.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ returned the young man; ‘the governor is human after

all. And now, John, let me see your famous pass-key. Get into bed, and

don’t move for any one till I come back. They won’t mind you not

answering when they knock; I generally don’t myself.’

CHAPTER IX—IN WHICH MR. NICHOLSON ACCEPTS THE PRINCIPLE OF AN ALLOWANCE

IN spite of the horrors of the day and the tea-drinking of the night,

John slept the sleep of infancy. He was awakened by the maid, as it

might have been ten years ago, tapping at the door. The winter sunrise

was painting the east; and as the window was to the back of the house, it

shone into the room with many strange colours of refracted light.

Without, the houses were all cleanly roofed with snow; the garden walls

were coped with it a foot in height; the greens lay glittering. Yet

strange as snow had grown to John during his years upon the Bay of San

Francisco, it was what he saw within that most affected him. For it was

to his own room that Alexander had been promoted; there was the old paper

with the device of flowers, in which a cunning fancy might yet detect the

face of Skinny Jim, of the Academy, John’s former dominie; there was the

old chest of drawers; there were the chairs—one, two, three—three as

before. Only the carpet was new, and the litter of Alexander’s clothes

and books and drawing materials, and a pencil-drawing on the wall, which

(in John’s eyes) appeared a marvel of proficiency.

He was thus lying, and looking, and dreaming, hanging, as it were,

between two epochs of his life, when Alexander came to the door, and made

his presence known in a loud whisper. John let him in, and jumped back

into the warm bed.

‘Well, John,’ said Alexander, ‘the cablegram is sent in your name, and

twenty words of answer paid. I have been to the cab office and paid your

cab, even saw the old gentleman himself, and properly apologised. He was

mighty placable, and indicated his belief you had been drinking. Then I

knocked up old Macewen out of bed, and explained affairs to him as he sat

and shivered in a dressing-gown. And before that I had been to the High

Street, where they have heard nothing of your dead body, so that I

incline to the idea that you dreamed it.’

‘Catch me!’ said John.

‘Well, the police never do know anything,’ assented Alexander; ‘and at

any rate, they have despatched a man to inquire and to recover your

trousers and your money, so that really your bill is now fairly clean;

and I see but one lion in your path—the governor.’

‘I’ll be turned out again, you’ll see,’ said John, dismally.

‘I don’t imagine so,’ returned the other; ‘not if you do what Flora and I

have arranged; and your business now is to dress, and lose no time about

it. Is your watch right? Well, you have a quarter of an hour. By five

minutes before the half-hour you must be at table, in your old seat,

under Uncle Duthie’s picture. Flora will be there to keep you

countenance; and we shall see what we shall see.’

‘Wouldn’t it be wiser for me to stay in bed?’ said John.

‘If you mean to manage your own concerns, you can do precisely what you

like,’ replied Alexander; ‘but if you are not in your place five minutes

before the half-hour I wash my hands of you, for one.’

And thereupon he departed. He had spoken warmly, but the truth is, his

heart was somewhat troubled. And as he hung over the balusters, watching

for his father to appear, he had hard ado to keep himself braced for the

encounter that must follow.

‘If he takes it well, I shall be lucky,’ he reflected.

‘If he takes it ill, why it’ll be a herring across John’s tracks, and

perhaps all for the best. He’s a confounded muff, this brother of mine,

but he seems a decent soul.’

At that stage a door opened below with a certain emphasis, and Mr.

Nicholson was seen solemnly to descend the stairs, and pass into his own

apartment. Alexander followed, quaking inwardly, but with a steady face.

He knocked, was bidden to enter, and found his father standing in front

of the forced drawer, to which he pointed as he spoke.

‘This is a most extraordinary thing,’ said he; ‘I have been robbed!’

‘I was afraid you would notice it,’ observed his son; ‘it made such a

beastly hash of the table.’

‘You were afraid I would notice it?’ repeated Mr. Nicholson. ‘And, pray,

what may that mean?’

‘That I was a thief, sir,’ returned Alexander. ‘I took all the money in

case the servants should get hold of it; and here is the change, and a

note of my expenditure. You were gone to bed, you see, and I did not

feel at liberty to knock you up; but I think when you have heard the

circumstances, you will do me justice. The fact is, I have reason to

believe there has been some dreadful error about my brother John; the

sooner it can be cleared up the better for all parties; it was a piece of

business, sir—and so I took it, and decided, on my own responsibility, to

send a telegram to San Francisco. Thanks to my quickness we may hear

to-night. There appears to be no doubt, sir, that John has been

abominably used.’

‘When did this take place?’ asked the father.

‘Last night, sir, after you were asleep,’ was the reply.

‘It’s most extraordinary,’ said Mr. Nicholson. ‘Do you mean to say you

have been out all night?’

‘All night, as you say, sir. I have been to the telegraph and the police

office, and Mr. Macewen’s. Oh, I had my hands full,’ said Alexander.

‘Very irregular,’ said the father. ‘You think of no one but yourself.’

‘I do not see that I have much to gain in bringing back my elder

brother,’ returned Alexander, shrewdly.

The answer pleased the old man; he smiled. ‘Well, well, I will go into

this after breakfast,’ said he.

‘I’m sorry about the table,’ said the son.

‘The table is a small matter; I think nothing of that,’ said the father.

‘It’s another example,’ continued the son, ‘of the awkwardness of a man

having no money of his own. If I had a proper allowance, like other

fellows of my age, this would have been quite unnecessary.’

‘A proper allowance!’ repeated his father, in tones of blighting sarcasm,

for the expression was not new to him. ‘I have never grudged you money

for any proper purpose.’

‘No doubt, no doubt,’ said Alexander, ‘but then you see you aren’t always

on the spot to have the thing explained to you. Last night, for

instance—’

‘You could have wakened me last night,’ interrupted his father.

‘Was it not some similar affair that first got John into a mess?’ asked

the son, skilfully evading the point.

But the father was not less adroit. ‘And pray, sir, how did you come and

go out of the house?’ he asked.

‘I forgot to lock the door, it seems,’ replied Alexander.

‘I have had cause to complain of that too often,’ said Mr. Nicholson.

‘But still I do not understand. Did you keep the servants up?’

‘I propose to go into all that at length after breakfast,’ returned

Alexander. ‘There is the half-hour going; we must not keep Miss

Mackenzie waiting.’

And greatly daring, he opened the door.

Even Alexander, who, it must have been perceived was on terms of

comparative freedom with his parent—even Alexander had never before dared

to cut short an interview in this high-handed fashion. But the truth is,

the very mass of his son’s delinquencies daunted the old gentleman. He

was like the man with the cart of apples—this was beyond him! That

Alexander should have spoiled his table, taken his money, stayed out all

night, and then coolly acknowledged all, was something undreamed of in

the Nicholsonian philosophy, and transcended comment. The return of the

change, which the old gentleman still carried in his hand, had been a

feature of imposing impudence; it had dealt him a staggering blow. Then

there was the reference to John’s original flight—a subject which he

always kept resolutely curtained in his own mind; for he was a man who

loved to have made no mistakes, and when he feared he might have made one

kept the papers sealed. In view of all these surprises and reminders,

and of his son’s composed and masterful demeanour, there began to creep

on Mr. Nicholson a sickly misgiving. He seemed beyond his depth; if he

did or said anything, he might come to regret it. The young man,

besides, as he had pointed out himself, was playing a generous part. And

if wrong had been done—and done to one who was, after, and in spite of,

all, a Nicholson—it should certainly be righted.

All things considered, monstrous as it was to be cut short in his

inquiries, the old gentleman submitted, pocketed the change, and followed

his son into the dining-room. During these few steps he once more

mentally revolted, and once more, and this time finally, laid down his

arms: a still, small voice in his bosom having informed him authentically

of a piece of news; that he was afraid of Alexander. The strange thing

was that he was pleased to be afraid of him. He was proud of his son; he

might be proud of him; the boy had character and grit, and knew what he

was doing.

These were his reflections as he turned the corner of the dining-room

door. Miss Mackenzie was in the place of honour, conjuring with a

tea-pot and a cosy; and, behold! there was another person present, a

large, portly, whiskered man of a very comfortable and respectable air,

who now rose from his seat and came forward, holding out his hand.

‘Good-morning, father,’ said he.

Of the contention of feeling that ran high in Mr. Nicholson’s starched

bosom, no outward sign was visible; nor did he delay long to make a

choice of conduct. Yet in that interval he had reviewed a great field of

possibilities both past and future; whether it was possible he had not

been perfectly wise in his treatment of John; whether it was possible

that John was innocent; whether, if he turned John out a second time, as

his outraged authority suggested, it was possible to avoid a scandal; and

whether, if he went to that extremity, it was possible that Alexander

might rebel.

‘Hum!’ said Mr. Nicholson, and put his hand, limp and dead, into John’s.

And then, in an embarrassed silence, all took their places; and even the

paper—from which it was the old gentleman’s habit to suck mortification

daily, as he marked the decline of our institutions—even the paper lay

furled by his side.

But presently Flora came to the rescue. She slid into the silence with a

technicality, asking if John still took his old inordinate amount of

sugar. Thence it was but a step to the burning question of the day; and

in tones a little shaken, she commented on the interval since she had

last made tea for the prodigal, and congratulated him on his return. And

then addressing Mr. Nicholson, she congratulated him also in a manner

that defied his ill-humour; and from that launched into the tale of

John’s misadventures, not without some suitable suppressions.

Gradually Alexander joined; between them, whether he would or no, they

forced a word or two from John; and these fell so tremulously, and spoke

so eloquently of a mind oppressed with dread, that Mr. Nicholson

relented. At length even he contributed a question: and before the meal

was at an end all four were talking even freely.

Prayers followed, with the servants gaping at this new-comer whom no one

had admitted; and after prayers there came that moment on the clock which

was the signal for Mr. Nicholson’s departure.

‘John,’ said he, ‘of course you will stay here. Be very careful not to

excite Maria, if Miss Mackenzie thinks it desirable that you should see

her. Alexander, I wish to speak with you alone.’ And then, when they

were both in the back room: ‘You need not come to the office to-day,’

said he; ‘you can stay and amuse your brother, and I think it would be

respectful to call on Uncle Greig. And by the bye’ (this spoken with a

certain—dare we say?—bashfulness), ‘I agree to concede the principle of

an allowance; and I will consult with Doctor Durie, who is quite a man of

the world and has sons of his own, as to the amount. And, my fine

fellow, you may consider yourself in luck!’ he added, with a smile.

‘Thank you,’ said Alexander.

Before noon a detective had restored to John his money, and brought news,

sad enough in truth, but perhaps the least sad possible. Alan had been

found in his own house in Regent Terrace, under care of the terrified

butler. He was quite mad, and instead of going to prison, had gone to

Morningside Asylum. The murdered man, it appeared, was an evicted tenant

who had for nearly a year pursued his late landlord with threats and

insults; and beyond this, the cause and details of the tragedy were lost.

When Mr. Nicholson returned from dinner they were able to put a despatch

into his hands: ‘John V. Nicholson, Randolph Crescent, Edinburgh.—Kirkham

has disappeared; police looking for him. All understood. Keep mind

quite easy.—Austin.’ Having had this explained to him, the old gentleman

took down the cellar key and departed for two bottles of the 1820 port.

Uncle Greig dined there that day, and Cousin Robina, and, by an odd

chance, Mr. Macewen; and the presence of these strangers relieved what

might have been otherwise a somewhat strained relation. Ere they

departed, the family was welded once more into a fair semblance of unity.

In the end of April John led Flora—or, as more descriptive, Flora led

John—to the altar, if altar that may be called which was indeed the

drawing-room mantel-piece in Mr. Nicholson’s house, with the Reverend Dr.

Durie posted on the hearthrug in the guise of Hymen’s priest.

The last I saw of them, on a recent visit to the north, was at a

dinner-party in the house of my old friend Gellatly Macbride; and after

we had, in classic phrase, ‘rejoined the ladies,’ I had an opportunity to

overhear Flora conversing with another married woman on the much

canvassed matter of a husband’s tobacco.

‘Oh yes!’ said she; ‘I only allow Mr. Nicholson four cigars a day. Three

he smokes at fixed times—after a meal, you know, my dear; and the fourth

he can take when he likes with any friend.’

‘Bravo!’ thought I to myself; ‘this is the wife for my friend John!’

THE BODY-SNATCHER

EVERY night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the

George at Debenham—the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and

myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come

rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own

particular arm-chair. Fettes was an old drunken Scotchman, a man of

education obviously, and a man of some property, since he lived in

idleness. He had come to Debenham years ago, while still young, and by a

mere continuance of living had grown to be an adopted townsman. His blue

camlet cloak was a local antiquity, like the church-spire. His place in

the parlour at the George, his absence from church, his old, crapulous,

disreputable vices, were all things of course in Debenham. He had some

vague Radical opinions and some fleeting infidelities, which he would now

and again set forth and emphasise with tottering slaps upon the table.

He drank rum—five glasses regularly every evening; and for the greater

portion of his nightly visit to the George sat, with his glass in his

right hand, in a state of melancholy alcoholic saturation. We called him

the Doctor, for he was supposed to have some special knowledge of

medicine, and had been known, upon a pinch, to set a fracture or reduce a

dislocation; but beyond these slight particulars, we had no knowledge of

his character and antecedents.

One dark winter night—it had struck nine some time before the landlord

joined us—there was a sick man in the George, a great neighbouring

proprietor suddenly struck down with apoplexy on his way to Parliament;

and the great man’s still greater London doctor had been telegraphed to

his bedside. It was the first time that such a thing had happened in

Debenham, for the railway was but newly open, and we were all

proportionately moved by the occurrence.

‘He’s come,’ said the landlord, after he had filled and lighted his pipe.

‘He?’ said I. ‘Who?—not the doctor?’

‘Himself,’ replied our host.

‘What is his name?’

‘Doctor Macfarlane,’ said the landlord.

Fettes was far through his third tumbler, stupidly fuddled, now nodding

over, now staring mazily around him; but at the last word he seemed to

awaken, and repeated the name ‘Macfarlane’ twice, quietly enough the

first time, but with sudden emotion at the second.

‘Yes,’ said the landlord, ‘that’s his name, Doctor Wolfe Macfarlane.’

Fettes became instantly sober; his eyes awoke, his voice became clear,

loud, and steady, his language forcible and earnest. We were all

startled by the transformation, as if a man had risen from the dead.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, ‘I am afraid I have not been paying much

attention to your talk. Who is this Wolfe Macfarlane?’ And then, when

he had heard the landlord out, ‘It cannot be, it cannot be,’ he added;

‘and yet I would like well to see him face to face.’

‘Do you know him, Doctor?’ asked the undertaker, with a gasp.

‘God forbid!’ was the reply. ‘And yet the name is a strange one; it were

too much to fancy two. Tell me, landlord, is he old?’

‘Well,’ said the host, ‘he’s not a young man, to be sure, and his hair is

white; but he looks younger than you.’

‘He is older, though; years older. But,’ with a slap upon the table,

‘it’s the rum you see in my face—rum and sin. This man, perhaps, may

have an easy conscience and a good digestion. Conscience! Hear me

speak. You would think I was some good, old, decent Christian, would you

not? But no, not I; I never canted. Voltaire might have canted if he’d

stood in my shoes; but the brains’—with a rattling fillip on his bald

head—‘the brains were clear and active, and I saw and made no

deductions.’

‘If you know this doctor,’ I ventured to remark, after a somewhat awful

pause, ‘I should gather that you do not share the landlord’s good

opinion.’

Fettes paid no regard to me.

‘Yes,’ he said, with sudden decision, ‘I must see him face to face.’

There was another pause, and then a door was closed rather sharply on the

first floor, and a step was heard upon the stair.

‘That’s the doctor,’ cried the landlord. ‘Look sharp, and you can catch

him.’

It was but two steps from the small parlour to the door of the old George

Inn; the wide oak staircase landed almost in the street; there was room

for a Turkey rug and nothing more between the threshold and the last

round of the descent; but this little space was every evening brilliantly

lit up, not only by the light upon the stair and the great signal-lamp

below the sign, but by the warm radiance of the bar-room window. The

George thus brightly advertised itself to passers-by in the cold street.

Fettes walked steadily to the spot, and we, who were hanging behind,

beheld the two men meet, as one of them had phrased it, face to face.

Dr. Macfarlane was alert and vigorous. His white hair set off his pale

and placid, although energetic, countenance. He was richly dressed in

the finest of broadcloth and the whitest of linen, with a great gold

watch-chain, and studs and spectacles of the same precious material. He

wore a broad-folded tie, white and speckled with lilac, and he carried on

his arm a comfortable driving-coat of fur. There was no doubt but he

became his years, breathing, as he did, of wealth and consideration; and

it was a surprising contrast to see our parlour sot—bald, dirty, pimpled,

and robed in his old camlet cloak—confront him at the bottom of the

stairs.

‘Macfarlane!’ he said somewhat loudly, more like a herald than a friend.

The great doctor pulled up short on the fourth step, as though the

familiarity of the address surprised and somewhat shocked his dignity.

‘Toddy Macfarlane!’ repeated Fettes.

The London man almost staggered. He stared for the swiftest of seconds

at the man before him, glanced behind him with a sort of scare, and then

in a startled whisper, ‘Fettes!’ he said, ‘You!’

‘Ay,’ said the other, ‘me! Did you think I was dead too? We are not so

easy shut of our acquaintance.’

‘Hush, hush!’ exclaimed the doctor. ‘Hush, hush! this meeting is so

unexpected—I can see you are unmanned. I hardly knew you, I confess, at

first; but I am overjoyed—overjoyed to have this opportunity. For the

present it must be how-d’ye-do and good-bye in one, for my fly is

waiting, and I must not fail the train; but you shall—let me see—yes—you

shall give me your address, and you can count on early news of me. We

must do something for you, Fettes. I fear you are out at elbows; but we

must see to that for auld lang syne, as once we sang at suppers.’

‘Money!’ cried Fettes; ‘money from you! The money that I had from you is

lying where I cast it in the rain.’

Dr. Macfarlane had talked himself into some measure of superiority and

confidence, but the uncommon energy of this refusal cast him back into

his first confusion.

A horrible, ugly look came and went across his almost venerable

countenance. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘be it as you please; my last

thought is to offend you. I would intrude on none. I will leave you my

address, however—’

‘I do not wish it—I do not wish to know the roof that shelters you,’

interrupted the other. ‘I heard your name; I feared it might be you; I

wished to know if, after all, there were a God; I know now that there is

none. Begone!’

He still stood in the middle of the rug, between the stair and doorway;

and the great London physician, in order to escape, would be forced to

step to one side. It was plain that he hesitated before the thought of

this humiliation. White as he was, there was a dangerous glitter in his

spectacles; but while he still paused uncertain, he became aware that the

driver of his fly was peering in from the street at this unusual scene

and caught a glimpse at the same time of our little body from the

parlour, huddled by the corner of the bar. The presence of so many

witnesses decided him at once to flee. He crouched together, brushing on

the wainscot, and made a dart like a serpent, striking for the door. But

his tribulation was not yet entirely at an end, for even as he was

passing Fettes clutched him by the arm and these words came in a whisper,

and yet painfully distinct, ‘Have you seen it again?’

The great rich London doctor cried out aloud with a sharp, throttling

cry; he dashed his questioner across the open space, and, with his hands

over his head, fled out of the door like a detected thief. Before it had

occurred to one of us to make a movement the fly was already rattling

toward the station. The scene was over like a dream, but the dream had

left proofs and traces of its passage. Next day the servant found the

fine gold spectacles broken on the threshold, and that very night we were

all standing breathless by the bar-room window, and Fettes at our side,

sober, pale, and resolute in look.

‘God protect us, Mr. Fettes!’ said the landlord, coming first into

possession of his customary senses. ‘What in the universe is all this?

These are strange things you have been saying.’

Fettes turned toward us; he looked us each in succession in the face.

‘See if you can hold your tongues,’ said he. ‘That man Macfarlane is not

safe to cross; those that have done so already have repented it too

late.’

And then, without so much as finishing his third glass, far less waiting

for the other two, he bade us good-bye and went forth, under the lamp of

the hotel, into the black night.

We three turned to our places in the parlour, with the big red fire and

four clear candles; and as we recapitulated what had passed, the first

chill of our surprise soon changed into a glow of curiosity. We sat

late; it was the latest session I have known in the old George. Each

man, before we parted, had his theory that he was bound to prove; and

none of us had any nearer business in this world than to track out the

past of our condemned companion, and surprise the secret that he shared

with the great London doctor. It is no great boast, but I believe I was

a better hand at worming out a story than either of my fellows at the

George; and perhaps there is now no other man alive who could narrate to

you the following foul and unnatural events.

In his young days Fettes studied medicine in the schools of Edinburgh.

He had talent of a kind, the talent that picks up swiftly what it hears

and readily retails it for its own. He worked little at home; but he was

civil, attentive, and intelligent in the presence of his masters. They

soon picked him out as a lad who listened closely and remembered well;

nay, strange as it seemed to me when I first heard it, he was in those

days well favoured, and pleased by his exterior. There was, at that

period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall here

designate by the letter K. His name was subsequently too well known.

The man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise,

while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burke called loudly for

the blood of his employer. But Mr. K— was then at the top of his vogue;

he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address, partly

to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The students,

at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and was

believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he had

acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. Mr. K— was a _bon

vivant_ as well as an accomplished teacher; he liked a sly illusion no

less than a careful preparation. In both capacities Fettes enjoyed and

deserved his notice, and by the second year of his attendance he held the

half-regular position of second demonstrator or sub-assistant in his

class.

In this capacity the charge of the theatre and lecture-room devolved in

particular upon his shoulders. He had to answer for the cleanliness of

the premises and the conduct of the other students, and it was a part of

his duty to supply, receive, and divide the various subjects. It was

with a view to this last—at that time very delicate—affair that he was

lodged by Mr. K— in the same wynd, and at last in the same building, with

the dissecting-rooms. Here, after a night of turbulent pleasures, his

hand still tottering, his sight still misty and confused, he would be

called out of bed in the black hours before the winter dawn by the

unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table. He would open

the door to these men, since infamous throughout the land. He would help

them with their tragic burden, pay them their sordid price, and remain

alone, when they were gone, with the unfriendly relics of humanity. From

such a scene he would return to snatch another hour or two of slumber, to

repair the abuses of the night, and refresh himself for the labours of

the day.

Few lads could have been more insensible to the impressions of a life

thus passed among the ensigns of mortality. His mind was closed against

all general considerations. He was incapable of interest in the fate and

fortunes of another, the slave of his own desires and low ambitions.

Cold, light, and selfish in the last resort, he had that modicum of

prudence, miscalled morality, which keeps a man from inconvenient

drunkenness or punishable theft. He coveted, besides, a measure of

consideration from his masters and his fellow-pupils, and he had no

desire to fail conspicuously in the external parts of life. Thus he made

it his pleasure to gain some distinction in his studies, and day after

day rendered unimpeachable eye-service to his employer, Mr. K—. For his

day of work he indemnified himself by nights of roaring, blackguardly

enjoyment; and when that balance had been struck, the organ that he

called his conscience declared itself content.

The supply of subjects was a continual trouble to him as well as to his

master. In that large and busy class, the raw material of the anatomists

kept perpetually running out; and the business thus rendered necessary

was not only unpleasant in itself, but threatened dangerous consequences

to all who were concerned. It was the policy of Mr. K— to ask no

questions in his dealings with the trade. ‘They bring the body, and we

pay the price,’ he used to say, dwelling on the alliteration—‘_quid pro

quo_.’ And, again, and somewhat profanely, ‘Ask no questions,’ he would

tell his assistants, ‘for conscience’ sake.’ There was no understanding

that the subjects were provided by the crime of murder. Had that idea

been broached to him in words, he would have recoiled in horror; but the

lightness of his speech upon so grave a matter was, in itself, an offence

against good manners, and a temptation to the men with whom he dealt.

Fettes, for instance, had often remarked to himself upon the singular

freshness of the bodies. He had been struck again and again by the

hang-dog, abominable looks of the ruffians who came to him before the

dawn; and putting things together clearly in his private thoughts, he

perhaps attributed a meaning too immoral and too categorical to the

unguarded counsels of his master. He understood his duty, in short, to

have three branches: to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to

avert the eye from any evidence of crime.

One November morning this policy of silence was put sharply to the test.

He had been awake all night with a racking toothache—pacing his room like

a caged beast or throwing himself in fury on his bed—and had fallen at

last into that profound, uneasy slumber that so often follows on a night

of pain, when he was awakened by the third or fourth angry repetition of

the concerted signal. There was a thin, bright moonshine; it was bitter

cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened, but an

indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the day. The

ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than usually eager

to be gone. Fettes, sick with sleep, lighted them upstairs. He heard

their grumbling Irish voices through a dream; and as they stripped the

sack from their sad merchandise he leaned dozing, with his shoulder

propped against the wall; he had to shake himself to find the men their

money. As he did so his eyes lighted on the dead face. He started; he

took two steps nearer, with the candle raised.

‘God Almighty!’ he cried. ‘That is Jane Galbraith!’

The men answered nothing, but they shuffled nearer the door.

‘I know her, I tell you,’ he continued. ‘She was alive and hearty

yesterday. It’s impossible she can be dead; it’s impossible you should

have got this body fairly.’

‘Sure, sir, you’re mistaken entirely,’ said one of the men.

But the other looked Fettes darkly in the eyes, and demanded the money on

the spot.

It was impossible to misconceive the threat or to exaggerate the danger.

The lad’s heart failed him. He stammered some excuses, counted out the

sum, and saw his hateful visitors depart. No sooner were they gone than

he hastened to confirm his doubts. By a dozen unquestionable marks he

identified the girl he had jested with the day before. He saw, with

horror, marks upon her body that might well betoken violence. A panic

seized him, and he took refuge in his room. There he reflected at length

over the discovery that he had made; considered soberly the bearing of

Mr. K—’s instructions and the danger to himself of interference in so

serious a business, and at last, in sore perplexity, determined to wait

for the advice of his immediate superior, the class assistant.

This was a young doctor, Wolfe Macfarlane, a high favourite among all the

reckless students, clever, dissipated, and unscrupulous to the last

degree. He had travelled and studied abroad. His manners were agreeable

and a little forward. He was an authority on the stage, skilful on the

ice or the links with skate or golf-club; he dressed with nice audacity,

and, to put the finishing touch upon his glory, he kept a gig and a

strong trotting-horse. With Fettes he was on terms of intimacy; indeed,

their relative positions called for some community of life; and when

subjects were scarce the pair would drive far into the country in

Macfarlane’s gig, visit and desecrate some lonely graveyard, and return

before dawn with their booty to the door of the dissecting-room.

On that particular morning Macfarlane arrived somewhat earlier than his

wont. Fettes heard him, and met him on the stairs, told him his story,

and showed him the cause of his alarm. Macfarlane examined the marks on

her body.

‘Yes,’ he said with a nod, ‘it looks fishy.’

‘Well, what should I do?’ asked Fettes.

‘Do?’ repeated the other. ‘Do you want to do anything? Least said

soonest mended, I should say.’

‘Some one else might recognise her,’ objected Fettes. ‘She was as well

known as the Castle Rock.’

‘We’ll hope not,’ said Macfarlane, ‘and if anybody does—well, you didn’t,

don’t you see, and there’s an end. The fact is, this has been going on

too long. Stir up the mud, and you’ll get K— into the most unholy

trouble; you’ll be in a shocking box yourself. So will I, if you come to

that. I should like to know how any one of us would look, or what the

devil we should have to say for ourselves, in any Christian witness-box.

For me, you know there’s one thing certain—that, practically speaking,

all our subjects have been murdered.’

‘Macfarlane!’ cried Fettes.

‘Come now!’ sneered the other. ‘As if you hadn’t suspected it yourself!’

‘Suspecting is one thing—’

‘And proof another. Yes, I know; and I’m as sorry as you are this should

have come here,’ tapping the body with his cane. ‘The next best thing

for me is not to recognise it; and,’ he added coolly, ‘I don’t. You may,

if you please. I don’t dictate, but I think a man of the world would do

as I do; and I may add, I fancy that is what K— would look for at our

hands. The question is, Why did he choose us two for his assistants?

And I answer, because he didn’t want old wives.’

This was the tone of all others to affect the mind of a lad like Fettes.

He agreed to imitate Macfarlane. The body of the unfortunate girl was

duly dissected, and no one remarked or appeared to recognise her.

One afternoon, when his day’s work was over, Fettes dropped into a

popular tavern and found Macfarlane sitting with a stranger. This was a

small man, very pale and dark, with coal-black eyes. The cut of his

features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly

realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance,

coarse, vulgar, and stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable

control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became

inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the

servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a

fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him with

unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he

confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad’s vanity

was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.

‘I’m a pretty bad fellow myself,’ the stranger remarked, ‘but Macfarlane

is the boy—Toddy Macfarlane I call him. Toddy, order your friend another

glass.’ Or it might be, ‘Toddy, you jump up and shut the door.’ ‘Toddy

hates me,’ he said again. ‘Oh yes, Toddy, you do!’

‘Don’t you call me that confounded name,’ growled Macfarlane.

‘Hear him! Did you ever see the lads play knife? He would like to do

that all over my body,’ remarked the stranger.

‘We medicals have a better way than that,’ said Fettes. ‘When we dislike

a dead friend of ours, we dissect him.’

Macfarlane looked up sharply, as though this jest were scarcely to his

mind.

The afternoon passed. Gray, for that was the stranger’s name, invited

Fettes to join them at dinner, ordered a feast so sumptuous that the

tavern was thrown into commotion, and when all was done commanded

Macfarlane to settle the bill. It was late before they separated; the

man Gray was incapably drunk. Macfarlane, sobered by his fury, chewed

the cud of the money he had been forced to squander and the slights he

had been obliged to swallow. Fettes, with various liquors singing in his

head, returned home with devious footsteps and a mind entirely in

abeyance. Next day Macfarlane was absent from the class, and Fettes

smiled to himself as he imagined him still squiring the intolerable Gray

from tavern to tavern. As soon as the hour of liberty had struck he

posted from place to place in quest of his last night’s companions. He

could find them, however, nowhere; so returned early to his rooms, went

early to bed, and slept the sleep of the just.

At four in the morning he was awakened by the well-known signal.

Descending to the door, he was filled with astonishment to find

Macfarlane with his gig, and in the gig one of those long and ghastly

packages with which he was so well acquainted.

‘What?’ he cried. ‘Have you been out alone? How did you manage?’

But Macfarlane silenced him roughly, bidding him turn to business. When

they had got the body upstairs and laid it on the table, Macfarlane made

at first as if he were going away. Then he paused and seemed to

hesitate; and then, ‘You had better look at the face,’ said he, in tones

of some constraint. ‘You had better,’ he repeated, as Fettes only stared

at him in wonder.

‘But where, and how, and when did you come by it?’ cried the other.

‘Look at the face,’ was the only answer.

Fettes was staggered; strange doubts assailed him. He looked from the

young doctor to the body, and then back again. At last, with a start, he

did as he was bidden. He had almost expected the sight that met his

eyes, and yet the shock was cruel. To see, fixed in the rigidity of

death and naked on that coarse layer of sackcloth, the man whom he had

left well clad and full of meat and sin upon the threshold of a tavern,

awoke, even in the thoughtless Fettes, some of the terrors of the

conscience. It was a _cras tibi_ which re-echoed in his soul, that two

whom he had known should have come to lie upon these icy tables. Yet

these were only secondary thoughts. His first concern regarded Wolfe.

Unprepared for a challenge so momentous, he knew not how to look his

comrade in the face. He durst not meet his eye, and he had neither words

nor voice at his command.

It was Macfarlane himself who made the first advance. He came up quietly

behind and laid his hand gently but firmly on the other’s shoulder.

‘Richardson,’ said he, ‘may have the head.’

Now Richardson was a student who had long been anxious for that portion

of the human subject to dissect. There was no answer, and the murderer

resumed: ‘Talking of business, you must pay me; your accounts, you see,

must tally.’

Fettes found a voice, the ghost of his own: ‘Pay you!’ he cried. ‘Pay

you for that?’

‘Why, yes, of course you must. By all means and on every possible

account, you must,’ returned the other. ‘I dare not give it for nothing,

you dare not take it for nothing; it would compromise us both. This is

another case like Jane Galbraith’s. The more things are wrong the more

we must act as if all were right. Where does old K— keep his money?’

‘There,’ answered Fettes hoarsely, pointing to a cupboard in the corner.

‘Give me the key, then,’ said the other, calmly, holding out his hand.

There was an instant’s hesitation, and the die was cast. Macfarlane

could not suppress a nervous twitch, the infinitesimal mark of an immense

relief, as he felt the key between his fingers. He opened the cupboard,

brought out pen and ink and a paper-book that stood in one compartment,

and separated from the funds in a drawer a sum suitable to the occasion.

‘Now, look here,’ he said, ‘there is the payment made—first proof of your

good faith: first step to your security. You have now to clinch it by a

second. Enter the payment in your book, and then you for your part may

defy the devil.’

The next few seconds were for Fettes an agony of thought; but in

balancing his terrors it was the most immediate that triumphed. Any

future difficulty seemed almost welcome if he could avoid a present

quarrel with Macfarlane. He set down the candle which he had been

carrying all this time, and with a steady hand entered the date, the

nature, and the amount of the transaction.

‘And now,’ said Macfarlane, ‘it’s only fair that you should pocket the

lucre. I’ve had my share already. By the bye, when a man of the world

falls into a bit of luck, has a few shillings extra in his pocket—I’m

ashamed to speak of it, but there’s a rule of conduct in the case. No

treating, no purchase of expensive class-books, no squaring of old debts;

borrow, don’t lend.’

‘Macfarlane,’ began Fettes, still somewhat hoarsely, ‘I have put my neck

in a halter to oblige you.’

‘To oblige me?’ cried Wolfe. ‘Oh, come! You did, as near as I can see

the matter, what you downright had to do in self-defence. Suppose I got

into trouble, where would you be? This second little matter flows

clearly from the first. Mr. Gray is the continuation of Miss Galbraith.

You can’t begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning;

that’s the truth. No rest for the wicked.’

A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon

the soul of the unhappy student.

‘My God!’ he cried, ‘but what have I done? and when did I begin? To be

made a class assistant—in the name of reason, where’s the harm in that?

Service wanted the position; Service might have got it. Would _he_ have

been where _I_ am now?’

‘My dear fellow,’ said Macfarlane, ‘what a boy you are! What harm _has_

come to you? What harm _can_ come to you if you hold your tongue? Why,

man, do you know what this life is? There are two squads of us—the lions

and the lambs. If you’re a lamb, you’ll come to lie upon these tables

like Gray or Jane Galbraith; if you’re a lion, you’ll live and drive a

horse like me, like K—, like all the world with any wit or courage.

You’re staggered at the first. But look at K—! My dear fellow, you’re

clever, you have pluck. I like you, and K— likes you. You were born to

lead the hunt; and I tell you, on my honour and my experience of life,

three days from now you’ll laugh at all these scarecrows like a High

School boy at a farce.’

And with that Macfarlane took his departure and drove off up the wynd in

his gig to get under cover before daylight. Fettes was thus left alone

with his regrets. He saw the miserable peril in which he stood involved.

He saw, with inexpressible dismay, that there was no limit to his

weakness, and that, from concession to concession, he had fallen from the

arbiter of Macfarlane’s destiny to his paid and helpless accomplice. He

would have given the world to have been a little braver at the time, but

it did not occur to him that he might still be brave. The secret of Jane

Galbraith and the cursed entry in the day-book closed his mouth.

Hours passed; the class began to arrive; the members of the unhappy Gray

were dealt out to one and to another, and received without remark.

Richardson was made happy with the head; and before the hour of freedom

rang Fettes trembled with exultation to perceive how far they had already

gone toward safety.

For two days he continued to watch, with increasing joy, the dreadful

process of disguise.

On the third day Macfarlane made his appearance. He had been ill, he

said; but he made up for lost time by the energy with which he directed

the students. To Richardson in particular he extended the most valuable

assistance and advice, and that student, encouraged by the praise of the

demonstrator, burned high with ambitious hopes, and saw the medal already

in his grasp.

Before the week was out Macfarlane’s prophecy had been fulfilled. Fettes

had outlived his terrors and had forgotten his baseness. He began to

plume himself upon his courage, and had so arranged the story in his mind

that he could look back on these events with an unhealthy pride. Of his

accomplice he saw but little. They met, of course, in the business of

the class; they received their orders together from Mr. K—. At times

they had a word or two in private, and Macfarlane was from first to last

particularly kind and jovial. But it was plain that he avoided any

reference to their common secret; and even when Fettes whispered to him

that he had cast in his lot with the lions and foresworn the lambs, he

only signed to him smilingly to hold his peace.

At length an occasion arose which threw the pair once more into a closer

union. Mr. K— was again short of subjects; pupils were eager, and it was

a part of this teacher’s pretensions to be always well supplied. At the

same time there came the news of a burial in the rustic graveyard of

Glencorse. Time has little changed the place in question. It stood

then, as now, upon a cross road, out of call of human habitations, and

buried fathom deep in the foliage of six cedar trees. The cries of the

sheep upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one

loudly singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to

pond, the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and

once in seven days the voice of the bell and the old tunes of the

precentor, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the

rural church. The Resurrection Man—to use a byname of the period—was not

to be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part

of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old

tombs, the paths worn by the feet of worshippers and mourners, and the

offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic

neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where

some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish,

the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was

attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been

laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there

came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and

mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy

relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless

byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of

gaping boys.

Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes and

Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that green and quiet

resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty

years, and been known for nothing but good butter and a godly

conversation, was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried,

dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with

her Sunday’s best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the

crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed to

that last curiosity of the anatomist.

Late one afternoon the pair set forth, well wrapped in cloaks and

furnished with a formidable bottle. It rained without remission—a cold,

dense, lashing rain. Now and again there blew a puff of wind, but these

sheets of falling water kept it down. Bottle and all, it was a sad and

silent drive as far as Penicuik, where they were to spend the evening.

They stopped once, to hide their implements in a thick bush not far from

the churchyard, and once again at the Fisher’s Tryst, to have a toast

before the kitchen fire and vary their nips of whisky with a glass of

ale. When they reached their journey’s end the gig was housed, the horse

was fed and comforted, and the two young doctors in a private room sat

down to the best dinner and the best wine the house afforded. The

lights, the fire, the beating rain upon the window, the cold, incongruous

work that lay before them, added zest to their enjoyment of the meal.

With every glass their cordiality increased. Soon Macfarlane handed a

little pile of gold to his companion.

‘A compliment,’ he said. ‘Between friends these little d-d

accommodations ought to fly like pipe-lights.’

Fettes pocketed the money, and applauded the sentiment to the echo. ‘You

are a philosopher,’ he cried. ‘I was an ass till I knew you. You and K—

between you, by the Lord Harry! but you’ll make a man of me.’

‘Of course we shall,’ applauded Macfarlane. ‘A man? I tell you, it

required a man to back me up the other morning. There are some big,

brawling, forty-year-old cowards who would have turned sick at the look

of the d-d thing; but not you—you kept your head. I watched you.’

‘Well, and why not?’ Fettes thus vaunted himself. ‘It was no affair of

mine. There was nothing to gain on the one side but disturbance, and on

the other I could count on your gratitude, don’t you see?’ And he

slapped his pocket till the gold pieces rang.

Macfarlane somehow felt a certain touch of alarm at these unpleasant

words. He may have regretted that he had taught his young companion so

successfully, but he had no time to interfere, for the other noisily

continued in this boastful strain:—

‘The great thing is not to be afraid. Now, between you and me, I don’t

want to hang—that’s practical; but for all cant, Macfarlane, I was born

with a contempt. Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the

old gallery of curiosities—they may frighten boys, but men of the world,

like you and me, despise them. Here’s to the memory of Gray!’

It was by this time growing somewhat late. The gig, according to order,

was brought round to the door with both lamps brightly shining, and the

young men had to pay their bill and take the road. They announced that

they were bound for Peebles, and drove in that direction till they were

clear of the last houses of the town; then, extinguishing the lamps,

returned upon their course, and followed a by-road toward Glencorse.

There was no sound but that of their own passage, and the incessant,

strident pouring of the rain. It was pitch dark; here and there a white

gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across

the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost

groping, that they picked their way through that resonant blackness to

their solemn and isolated destination. In the sunken woods that traverse

the neighbourhood of the burying-ground the last glimmer failed them, and

it became necessary to kindle a match and re-illumine one of the lanterns

of the gig. Thus, under the dripping trees, and environed by huge and

moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed labours.

They were both experienced in such affairs, and powerful with the spade;

and they had scarce been twenty minutes at their task before they were

rewarded by a dull rattle on the coffin lid. At the same moment

Macfarlane, having hurt his hand upon a stone, flung it carelessly above

his head. The grave, in which they now stood almost to the shoulders,

was close to the edge of the plateau of the graveyard; and the gig lamp

had been propped, the better to illuminate their labours, against a tree,

and on the immediate verge of the steep bank descending to the stream.

Chance had taken a sure aim with the stone. Then came a clang of broken

glass; night fell upon them; sounds alternately dull and ringing

announced the bounding of the lantern down the bank, and its occasional

collision with the trees. A stone or two, which it had dislodged in its

descent, rattled behind it into the profundities of the glen; and then

silence, like night, resumed its sway; and they might bend their hearing

to its utmost pitch, but naught was to be heard except the rain, now

marching to the wind, now steadily falling over miles of open country.

They were so nearly at an end of their abhorred task that they judged it

wisest to complete it in the dark. The coffin was exhumed and broken

open; the body inserted in the dripping sack and carried between them to

the gig; one mounted to keep it in its place, and the other, taking the

horse by the mouth, groped along by wall and bush until they reached the

wider road by the Fisher’s Tryst. Here was a faint, diffused radiancy,

which they hailed like daylight; by that they pushed the horse to a good

pace and began to rattle along merrily in the direction of the town.

They had both been wetted to the skin during their operations, and now,

as the gig jumped among the deep ruts, the thing that stood propped

between them fell now upon one and now upon the other. At every

repetition of the horrid contact each instinctively repelled it with the

greater haste; and the process, natural although it was, began to tell

upon the nerves of the companions. Macfarlane made some ill-favoured

jest about the farmer’s wife, but it came hollowly from his lips, and was

allowed to drop in silence. Still their unnatural burden bumped from

side to side; and now the head would be laid, as if in confidence, upon

their shoulders, and now the drenching sack-cloth would flap icily about

their faces. A creeping chill began to possess the soul of Fettes. He

peered at the bundle, and it seemed somehow larger than at first. All

over the country-side, and from every degree of distance, the farm dogs

accompanied their passage with tragic ululations; and it grew and grew

upon his mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that

some nameless change had befallen the dead body, and that it was in fear

of their unholy burden that the dogs were howling.

‘For God’s sake,’ said he, making a great effort to arrive at speech,

‘for God’s sake, let’s have a light!’

Seemingly Macfarlane was affected in the same direction; for, though he

made no reply, he stopped the horse, passed the reins to his companion,

got down, and proceeded to kindle the remaining lamp. They had by that

time got no farther than the cross-road down to Auchenclinny. The rain

still poured as though the deluge were returning, and it was no easy

matter to make a light in such a world of wet and darkness. When at last

the flickering blue flame had been transferred to the wick and began to

expand and clarify, and shed a wide circle of misty brightness round the

gig, it became possible for the two young men to see each other and the

thing they had along with them. The rain had moulded the rough sacking

to the outlines of the body underneath; the head was distinct from the

trunk, the shoulders plainly modelled; something at once spectral and

human riveted their eyes upon the ghastly comrade of their drive.

For some time Macfarlane stood motionless, holding up the lamp. A

nameless dread was swathed, like a wet sheet, about the body, and

tightened the white skin upon the face of Fettes; a fear that was

meaningless, a horror of what could not be, kept mounting to his brain.

Another beat of the watch, and he had spoken. But his comrade

forestalled him.

‘That is not a woman,’ said Macfarlane, in a hushed voice.

‘It was a woman when we put her in,’ whispered Fettes.

‘Hold that lamp,’ said the other. ‘I must see her face.’

And as Fettes took the lamp his companion untied the fastenings of the

sack and drew down the cover from the head. The light fell very clear

upon the dark, well-moulded features and smooth-shaven cheeks of a too

familiar countenance, often beheld in dreams of both of these young men.

A wild yell rang up into the night; each leaped from his own side into

the roadway: the lamp fell, broke, and was extinguished; and the horse,

terrified by this unusual commotion, bounded and went off toward

Edinburgh at a gallop, bearing along with it, sole occupant of the gig,

the body of the dead and long-dissected Gray.

THE STORY OF A LIE

CHAPTER I—INTRODUCES THE ADMIRAL

WHEN Dick Naseby was in Paris he made some odd acquaintances; for he was

one of those who have ears to hear, and can use their eyes no less than

their intelligence. He made as many thoughts as Stuart Mill; but his

philosophy concerned flesh and blood, and was experimental as to its

method. He was a type-hunter among mankind. He despised small game and

insignificant personalities, whether in the shape of dukes or bagmen,

letting them go by like sea-weed; but show him a refined or powerful

face, let him hear a plangent or a penetrating voice, fish for him with a

living look in some one’s eye, a passionate gesture, a meaning and

ambiguous smile, and his mind was instantaneously awakened. ‘There was a

man, there was a woman,’ he seemed to say, and he stood up to the task of

comprehension with the delight of an artist in his art.

And indeed, rightly considered, this interest of his was an artistic

interest. There is no science in the personal study of human nature.

All comprehension is creation; the woman I love is somewhat of my

handiwork; and the great lover, like the great painter, is he that can so

embellish his subject as to make her more than human, whilst yet by a

cunning art he has so based his apotheosis on the nature of the case that

the woman can go on being a true woman, and give her character free play,

and show littleness, or cherish spite, or be greedy of common pleasures,

and he continue to worship without a thought of incongruity. To love a

character is only the heroic way of understanding it. When we love, by

some noble method of our own or some nobility of mien or nature in the

other, we apprehend the loved one by what is noblest in ourselves. When

we are merely studying an eccentricity, the method of our study is but a

series of allowances. To begin to understand is to begin to sympathise;

for comprehension comes only when we have stated another’s faults and

virtues in terms of our own. Hence the proverbial toleration of artists

for their own evil creations. Hence, too, it came about that Dick

Naseby, a high-minded creature, and as scrupulous and brave a gentleman

as you would want to meet, held in a sort of affection the various human

creeping things whom he had met and studied.

One of these was Mr. Peter Van Tromp, an English-speaking, two-legged

animal of the international genus, and by profession of general and more

than equivocal utility. Years before he had been a painter of some

standing in a colony, and portraits signed ‘Van Tromp’ had celebrated the

greatness of colonial governors and judges. In those days he had been

married, and driven his wife and infant daughter in a pony trap. What

were the steps of his declension? No one exactly knew. Here he was at

least, and had been any time these past ten years, a sort of dismal

parasite upon the foreigner in Paris.

It would be hazardous to specify his exact industry. Coarsely followed,

it would have merited a name grown somewhat unfamiliar to our ears.

Followed as he followed it, with a skilful reticence, in a kind of social

chiaroscuro, it was still possible for the polite to call him a

professional painter. His lair was in the Grand Hotel and the gaudiest

cafés. There he might be seen jotting off a sketch with an air of some

inspiration; and he was always affable, and one of the easiest of men to

fall in talk withal. A conversation usually ripened into a peculiar sort

of intimacy, and it was extraordinary how many little services Van Tromp

contrived to render in the course of six-and-thirty hours. He occupied a

position between a friend and a courier, which made him worse than

embarrassing to repay. But those whom he obliged could always buy one of

his villainous little pictures, or, where the favours had been prolonged

and more than usually delicate, might order and pay for a large canvas,

with perfect certainty that they would hear no more of the transaction.

Among resident artists he enjoyed celebrity of a non-professional sort.

He had spent more money—no less than three individual fortunes, it was

whispered—than any of his associates could ever hope to gain. Apart from

his colonial career, he had been to Greece in a brigantine with four

brass carronades; he had travelled Europe in a chaise and four, drawing

bridle at the palace-doors of German princes; queens of song and dance

had followed him like sheep and paid his tailor’s bills. And to behold

him now, seeking small loans with plaintive condescension, sponging for

breakfast on an art-student of nineteen, a fallen Don Juan who had

neglected to die at the propitious hour, had a colour of romance for

young imaginations. His name and his bright past, seen through the prism

of whispered gossip, had gained him the nickname of _The Admiral_.

Dick found him one day at the receipt of custom, rapidly painting a pair

of hens and a cock in a little water-colour sketching box, and now and

then glancing at the ceiling like a man who should seek inspiration from

the muse. Dick thought it remarkable that a painter should choose to

work over an absinthe in a public café, and looked the man over. The

aged rakishness of his appearance was set off by a youthful costume; he

had disreputable grey hair and a disreputable sore, red nose; but the

coat and the gesture, the outworks of the man, were still designed for

show. Dick came up to his table and inquired if he might look at what

the gentleman was doing. No one was so delighted as the Admiral.

‘A bit of a thing,’ said he. ‘I just dash them off like that. I—I dash

them off,’ he added with a gesture.

‘Quite so,’ said Dick, who was appalled by the feebleness of the

production.

‘Understand me,’ continued Van Tromp; ‘I am a man of the world. And

yet—once an artist always an artist. All of a sudden a thought takes me

in the street; I become its prey: it’s like a pretty woman; no use to

struggle; I must—dash it off.’

‘I see,’ said Dick.

‘Yes,’ pursued the painter; ‘it all comes easily, easily to me; it is not

my business; it’s a pleasure. Life is my business—life—this great city,

Paris—Paris after dark—its lights, its gardens, its odd corners. Aha!’

he cried, ‘to be young again! The heart is young, but the heels are

leaden. A poor, mean business, to grow old! Nothing remains but the

_coup d’œil_, the contemplative man’s enjoyment, Mr. —,’ and he paused

for the name.

‘Naseby,’ returned Dick.

The other treated him at once to an exciting beverage, and expatiated on

the pleasure of meeting a compatriot in a foreign land; to hear him, you

would have thought they had encountered in Central Africa. Dick had

never found any one take a fancy to him so readily, nor show it in an

easier or less offensive manner. He seemed tickled with him as an

elderly fellow about town might be tickled by a pleasant and witty lad;

he indicated that he was no precision, but in his wildest times had never

been such a blade as he thought Dick. Dick protested, but in vain. This

manner of carrying an intimacy at the bayonet’s point was Van Tromp’s

stock-in-trade. With an older man he insinuated himself; with youth he

imposed himself, and in the same breath imposed an ideal on his victim,

who saw that he must work up to it or lose the esteem of this old and

vicious patron. And what young man can bear to lose a character for

vice?

At last, as it grew towards dinner-time, ‘Do you know Paris?’ asked Van

Tromp.

‘Not so well as you, I am convinced,’ said Dick.

‘And so am I,’ returned Van Tromp gaily. ‘Paris! My young friend—you

will allow me?—when you know Paris as I do, you will have seen Strange

Things. I say no more; all I say is, Strange Things. We are men of the

world, you and I, and in Paris, in the heart of civilised existence.

This is an opportunity, Mr. Naseby. Let us dine. Let me show you where

to dine.’

Dick consented. On the way to dinner the Admiral showed him where to buy

gloves, and made him buy them; where to buy cigars, and made him buy a

vast store, some of which he obligingly accepted. At the restaurant he

showed him what to order, with surprising consequences in the bill. What

he made that night by his percentages it would be hard to estimate. And

all the while Dick smilingly consented, understanding well that he was

being done, but taking his losses in the pursuit of character as a hunter

sacrifices his dogs. As for the Strange Things, the reader will be

relieved to hear that they were no stranger than might have been

expected, and he may find things quite as strange without the expense of

a Van Tromp for guide. Yet he was a guide of no mean order, who made up

for the poverty of what he had to show by a copious, imaginative

commentary.

‘And such,’ said he, with a hiccup, ‘such is Paris.’

‘Pooh!’ said Dick, who was tired of the performance.

The Admiral hung an ear, and looked up sidelong with a glimmer of

suspicion.

‘Good night,’ said Dick; ‘I’m tired.’

‘So English!’ cried Van Tromp, clutching him by the hand. ‘So English!

So _blasé_! Such a charming companion! Let me see you home.’

‘Look here,’ returned Dick, ‘I have said good night, and now I’m going.

You’re an amusing old boy: I like you, in a sense; but here’s an end of

it for to-night. Not another cigar, not another grog, not another

percentage out of me.’

‘I beg your pardon!’ cried the Admiral with dignity.

‘Tut, man!’ said Dick; ‘you’re not offended; you’re a man of the world, I

thought. I’ve been studying you, and it’s over. Have I not paid for the

lesson? _Au revoir_.’

Van Tromp laughed gaily, shook hands up to the elbows, hoped cordially

they would meet again and that often, but looked after Dick as he

departed with a tremor of indignation. After that they two not

unfrequently fell in each other’s way, and Dick would often treat the old

boy to breakfast on a moderate scale and in a restaurant of his own

selection. Often, too, he would lend Van Tromp the matter of a pound, in

view of that gentleman’s contemplated departure for Australia; there

would be a scene of farewell almost touching in character, and a week or

a month later they would meet on the same boulevard without surprise or

embarrassment. And in the meantime Dick learned more about his

acquaintance on all sides: heard of his yacht, his chaise and four, his

brief season of celebrity amid a more confiding population, his daughter,

of whom he loved to whimper in his cups, his sponging, parasitical,

nameless way of life; and with each new detail something that was not

merely interest nor yet altogether affection grew up in his mind towards

this disreputable stepson of the arts. Ere he left Paris Van Tromp was

one of those whom he entertained to a farewell supper; and the old

gentleman made the speech of the evening, and then fell below the table,

weeping, smiling, paralysed.