often carry a moral which may prevent a repetition of these; and so, had
it not been for this apparently inexplicable death by starvation, our
wonderful story might never have gathered listeners round the evening
fire. We must go back some twenty years before the date of the said
sermon to find a certain merchant-burgess of the city of Edinburgh,
David Grierson, occupying a portion of a front land situated in the
Canongate, a little to the east of Leith Wynd. It would be sheer
affectation in us to pretend that this merchant-burgess had any mental
or physical characteristic about him to justify his appearance in a
romance, if we except the power he had shown of amassing wealth, of
which he had so much that he could boast the possession of more than
twenty goodly tenements, some of wood and some of stone, besides shares
of ships and bank stock. And no doubt this exception might stand for the
thing excepted from, for money, though commonly said to be extraneous,
is often so far in its influences intraneous, that it changes the
feelings and motives, and enables them to work. And then don't we know
that it is by extraneous things we are mostly led? But however all that
may be, certain it is that our merchant-burgess was a great man in his
own house in the Canongate, where his family consisted of Rachel
Grierson, his natural daughter, by a woman who had been long dead, and
Walter Grierson, his legitimate nephew, who had been left an orphan in
his early years, and who was his nearest lawful heir. Two servants
completed the household; and surely in this rather curious combination
there might be, if only circumstances were favourable to their
development, elements which might impart interest to a story.
So long as the shadow of the dark angel was, as Time counted, far away
from him, Burgess David was comparatively happy; but as he got old and
older, he began to realize the condition of the poet--
"Now pleasure will no longer please,
And all the joys of life are gone;
I ask no more on earth but ease,
To be at peace, and be alone:
I ask in vain the winged powers
That weave man's destiny on high;
In vain I ask the golden hours
That o'er my head for ever fly."
Then he waxed more and more anxious as to what he was to do with his
money. He tried to put away the thought; but the terrible _magistra
necessitas_ went round and round him with ever-diminishing circles,
clearly indicating a conflict in which he must succumb. He must make a
will; an act which it is said no man is ever in a hearty condition to
perform, unless mayhap he is angry, and wishes to cut off an ungrateful
dog with a shilling; and besides the general disinclination to sign the
disposal of so much wealth, of which he was more than ordinarily fond,
and to give away, as it were, _omnia praeter animam_, in the very view
of giving away the soul too, he was in a great perplexity as to how to
divide his means. Nor could he reconcile himself to a division at all,
preferring, as the greatly lesser evil, the alternative of destinating
his fortune all of a lump, with some hope of its being kept together. As
for Walter, though he had some affection for him, he had not much
confidence in him, for he had seen that he was hare-brained as regarded
things which suited his fancy, and pig-brained as respected those which
solicited and required sound judgment; while Rachel, again, was
everything which, among the lower angels, could be comprehended under
the delightful title of "dear soul," an amiable and devoted creature, as
stedfast in her affections as she was wise in the selection of their
objects. So by revolving in his mind all the beauties of the character
of her who, however disqualified by law, was still of his flesh and
blood, yea, of his very nature, as he complacently thought in compliment
to himself, he became more and more reconciled to his intention, if the
very thought of making a will, which had been horrible to him, did not
become even a pleasing kind of meditation. So is it--when Nature imposes
an inevitable duty, she gives man the power of inventing a pleasing
reason for his obedience; nay, so much of a self-dissembler is he, that
he even cheats himself into the belief that his obedience is an act of
his own will. In all which he at least proved the value of one of the
arguments in favour of marriage; for trite it is to say, a bachelor
bears to no one a love which reconciles him to will-making, while a
father, in leaving his means to his children, feels as if he were giving
to himself. But this plan of our merchant-burgess had in addition a
spice of ingenuity in it which still more pleased him--he would so
contrive matters that the daughter and the nephew would become, after
his death, man and wife. He had only some doubts how far their tastes
agreed,--probably an absurd condition, in so much as we all know that
love is often struck out by opposition, and that there is a pleasant
suitability in a husband preferring the head of a herring, and the wife
the tail.
Having thus arrived at a sense of his duty by the pleasant path of his
affection, Mr. David Grierson seized the first opportunity which
presented itself of sounding the heart of Rachel, in order to know in
what direction her affections ran. Sitting in his big chair, all so
comfortably cushioned by the hands of the said Rachel herself, and with
a good fire alongside, due also to her unremitting care, he called her
to him, and placing his arm round her waist, as he was often in the
habit of doing, said to her--
"Rachel, dear, I feel day by day my strength leaving me, and it may be,
nay, will be, that I will not be very much longer with you."
Rachel looked at him for a little, but said nothing, for, as the saying
goes, her heart came to her mouth, and she could not have spoken even if
she would; but the father understood all this, and preferred the mute
expression of a real grief to a hysterical burst--of which, indeed, her
calm genial nature was incapable.
"Forgive me, dear," continued he, "for I would not willingly cause you
sorrow, but I have a reason for speaking in this grave way. Who is to
fill the old arm-chair when I cannot occupy it?"
And he smiled somewhat grimly as he sought her eye, in which he could
observe the most real of all nature's evidences of emotion.
"What mean you, father?" she replied, with something like an effort to
respond to his humour.
"Why, then, Rachel," he said, "to be out with it, I want to know whether
you have fixed your heart on any one."
"Only upon you, dear father," she replied, with a smile which struggled
against her seriousness.
"Nay, Rachel," continued he. "It is no light matter, and I must have an
answer. I intend to leave you my whole fortune, but upon one condition,
which is, that if Walter Grierson shall sue for your hand, you will
consent to marry him."
To this there was a reply given with an alacrity which showed how her
heart pointed--"Yes;" then, adding that wonderful little word "but,"
which makes such havoc among our resolutions, she paused, while her eyes
sought the ground.
"What 'but' can be here?" interjected the old man. "Surely you do not
mean to doubt whether _he_ would consent?"
"And yet that is just my doubt," she replied, as if she felt humiliated
by the admission.
"Doubt!" cried the father, in rising wrath; "doubt, doubt if a beggar
would consent to be made rich by marrying _you_! Why, Rachel, dear, if
the fellow were to breathe a sigh of hesitation, he would deserve to be
a beggar with more holes than wholes in his gabardine, and too poor even
to possess a wallet to carry his bones and crumbs. Have you any reason
for your strange statement?"
"No," replied the girl, with a sigh. "It is only my heart that speaks."
"And the heart never lies," said he sharply. "But I shall see," he
muttered to himself, "whether a certain tongue in a certain head shall
speak in the same way."
"But would it not bring me down," said she, "were he to think that he
was forced by a promise?"
"A promise!" rejoined he; "why, so it would, my dear. I see you are
right." But then he thought he could sound him without putting any
obligation upon him. "And a pretty obligation it would be," he
continued, "for a young fellow cut off with a shilling to bind himself
to consent to be the acceptor of two such gifts as a fine girl and a
fortune."
And Burgess David tried to laugh; but the effort was still that of a
heavy heart, and, reclining his head upon the back of the chair, he
relapsed into those thoughts which, as Age advances to the term where
Hope throws down her lamp, press in and in upon the spirit. Rachel
glided away quietly, perhaps to think; and certainly she had something
to think about.
So, too, doubtless had Mr. David Grierson, who, after indulging in his
reverie, wherein the subject of will-making suggested a match between
himself and a certain bridegroom who never says nay, awoke to the
interest of his scheme of match-making in this world. So far he had
accomplished his object, for he could rely upon his faithful Rachel's
performance of her promise; and if the two should be married, he knew
how to take care to give her the power of the money, and keep a youth,
in whose prudence he had no great faith, in proper check. Next he had to
sound the nephew. Nor was it long before he had an opportunity--even
that same afternoon.
"Walter," he began with an abruptness for which probably the young man
was scarcely prepared, "I am getting old, and must now think of
arranging my affairs so as to endeavour to make my fortune serve the
purpose of rendering those happy in whom I have a natural interest. So I
have some interest also as well as, I suspect, some right to put the
question to you, whether you ever thought of Rachel Grierson for your
wife?"
"Upon my word," replied the nephew, with just as little _mauvais honte_
as suited his nature, "I never thought of aspiring to the _honour_."
A word this last which grated on the ear of the rich merchant-burgess,
inasmuch as it suggested a suspicion of the figure of speech called
irony, seeing that Rachel Grierson was a bastard, and the youth carried
the legitimate blood of the Griersons in his veins.
"Honour or no honour," replied he sharply, and perhaps contrary to his
original intention, "Rachel Grierson is to inherit my fortune, ay, every
penny thereof."
"Every penny thereof," echoed the youth, as if his mind had flown away
with the words, and dropt them in despair as it flew.
"Yes," rejoined the angry uncle, "lands, tenements, hereditaments,
shares, dividends, stock, furniture, bed and table linen."
"And table linen," echoed the entranced nephew.
"Yes; everything," continued the uncle; and calming down as he saw the
white lips and blank despair of the youth, he added--"And to you I will
leave and bequeath my natural-born daughter, Rachel Grierson."
And as he uttered these significant words, he watched carefully the face
of the youth, where, however, all indications defied his perspicacity,
inasmuch as blank astonishment was still the prevailing expression. But
after some minutes the young man stuttered out--
"A legacy worthy of a nobleman!"
Words that sounded beautifully, because they were true as regarded
Rachel, whatever they might be as respected his secret intention; yet as
the children vaticinate from the examination of each other's tongues, if
the uncle had examined the organ, he might have discovered some of those
blue lines which produce an exclamation from the young augurs.
"_Words_ worthy, too, of a nobleman," cried the old man in a trembling
voice; and holding out his hand, which shook under his emotion of
delight at hearing his beloved Rachel so praised, he seized that of his
nephew--
"Yes, Walter," he added, "you have by these words redeemed yourself, and
I will take them as an offering of your willingness to accept my legacy;
but, remember, I extort no promise, which might reduce the value of a
young woman's affection,--a gift to be accepted for its own sake."
"I am content," said Walter.
"And I am satisfied," added the uncle. "But here is wine on the table,"
he continued, as he turned his eye in the direction of a decanter of
good claret, just as if Rachel had, by her art of love, anticipated
what he wished at this moment. "Ah, Walter, if she shall watch your
wants as she has done mine, you will live to feel that you cannot want
_her_, and live; so fill up a glass for me, and one for yourself, that
we may drink to the happiness of the dear girl when, after I am dead,
she shall become your wedded wife."
"With all and sundry lands, tenements, hereditaments, and so forth,"
cried Walter, with a laugh which might pass as genuine, and which was
responded to by a chuckle from the dry throat of the uncle, which
certainly was so.
So the pledge was taken; and Walter Grierson went away, leaving the old
merchant-burgess as happy as any poor mortal creature can be when so
near the term of his departure. Such is our way of speaking; and yet we
are forced to admit, that at no period of life, however near the
ultimate, abating the advent of the great illumination which breaks like
a new dawn upon the internal sense of a favoured few, can you say that
the hold of this world upon the spirit is ever renounced. Whether the
young man was as happy, we may not venture to say; but this we might
surmise, even at this stage of our story, and in reference to the
classical proverb, that the bastard might be the beautiful Nisa, and the
lawful heir the ill-favoured Mopsus.
These things we may leave to development; and with a caution to the
reader not to be over-suspicious, we will follow our Nisa, Rachel
Grierson, as she proceeds from the house of the merchant-burgess up the
High Street, at a period of the evening of the same day when the shadows
of the tall lands wrapped the crowds of loiterers and passengers almost
in utter darkness; not that she chose this time for any purpose of
secrecy,--for she had no secret, except that solitary one which every
young woman has, and holds, up to the minute of conviction, that she is
engaged, after which it becomes a flame blown by her own breath,--but
simply because it suited the routine of her duties. Her night-cloak kept
her from the cold, and the panoply of her virtue secured her from
insult; so, threading her way amidst the throng, she arrived at the head
of the old winding street called the West Bow, where, at a projection a
little to the north of Major Weir's Entry, she mounted a narrow stair.
On arriving at a door on the third landing-place, she tapped gently, and
in obedience to a shrill voice, which cried "Come in," she lifted the
latch, and entered a small room, where, at a bench, sat a very peculiar
personage. This was no other than the famous Paul Bennett, an artist in
jewellery, who at that time excelled all his compeers for beauty of
design and exquisite refinement of minute elaboration. And this,
perhaps, a good judge of mankind might have augured of him; for while
his body was far below the middle size, his long thin fingers, tapering
to a point, seemed to be suitable instruments intended to serve a pair
of dark eyes so lustrous and sharp, that nothing within the point of the
beginning of infinitesimals might seem to escape them. Nor was his pale
face less suggestive of his peculiar faculties; for it was made up of
fine delicate features, harmonized into regularity, and so expressive,
that it seemed to change with every feeling of the moment, even as the
flitting moonbeams play on the face of a statue. In addition to these
peculiarities, his appearance was rendered the more striking, that,
working as he did under a strong reflected light, cast down immediately
before his face by a dark shade, the upper part of his person and a
circle on the bench were in bright relief, while the other parts of the
room were comparatively dark.
"Still at work, Paul," said Rachel, as she entered; "how long do you
intend to work to-night?"
"Till the idea becomes dim, and the sense waxes thick," replied he, as
he turned his eyes upon her.
"I have something to tell you," she continued, as she sat down on a
chair between him and the fire, if that could be called such which
consisted of some red cinders.
"Some other wonder," replied he; "another cropping out of the workings
of fate."
Words these, as coming from our little artist, which require some
explanation, to the effect that Paul was a philosopher, too, in his own
way. Early misfortunes, which mocked the resolutions of a will never
very strong, had played into a habit of thinking, and brought him to the
conviction that every movement or change in the moral world, not less
than in the physical, is the result of a cause which runs back through
endless generations to the first man, and even beyond him. Paul was, in
short, a fatalist; not of that kind which romance writers feign in order
to make the character work through a gloomy presentiment of his own
destiny, but merely a believer in a universal original decree, the
workings of which we never know until the effects are seen. A fatalist
of this kind almost every man is, less or more, in some mood or another;
only, to save himself from being a puppet, moved by springs or drawn by
strings, he generally contrives to except his _will_ from the scheme of
the iron-bound necessity. But Paul would permit of no such exception.
The will, with him, was merely the _motive in action_; and as he
compelled you to admit that no thought is, in man's experience, ever
called into being, only developed from prior conditions, and that, even
as to an idea, the doctrine _Nihil nisi ex ovo_ is true, and therefore
that no man can manufacture a motive, so he took a short way with the
maintainers of a moral liberty. This doctrine, so gloomy, so grand, yet
so terrible, was, to Paul, a conviction, which he almost made practical;
nay, he seemed to realize a kind of poetic pleasure from reveries, which
represented to him the universe, with the sun and the stars, and all
living creatures--walking, flying, swimming, or crawling--going through
their parts in the great melodrama of destiny, no one knowing how, or
why, or wherefore, yet every human being believing that he is master of
his actions, at the very moment that he might be conscious that his
belief is only a part of the great law of necessity. Then it seemed as
if this delusion in which men indulge, and are forced to indulge, was an
element of the farce introduced into the play, so as to relieve the mind
from the heavy burden of contemplating so terrible a theory.
"Something to tell me, Rachel!" continued he; "and what may that be?"
"My father has told me to-day," replied she, "that he is to leave me all
his fortune; and however grieved I may be at the thought of losing him,
I am glad to think that it may be in my power to be of service to you,
Paul, as my only relative on my mother's side."
"Service," muttered Paul to himself, while he looked into her face as
wistfully as a lover, which indeed he was, though in secret. "And what
is to become of Walter Grierson?" he asked.
"When he finds that the entire fortune is mine," replied she, "he will
propose to marry me; and this is what my father wishes to bring about by
putting the fortune in my power."
"So the events crop out from the long chain of causes," thought Paul;
"but who shall tell the final issue? Look here, Rachel," he continued,
as he laid his hand on a golden locket which lay before him in the shape
of a heart, "I have made this to order;" and as he spoke he touched a
spring, whereupon a lid opened, and up flew a pair of tiny doves, which,
with fluttering wings of gold and azure, immediately saluted each other
with their long bills, and piped a few notes in imitation of the cushat.
The touch of another spring immediately consigned them again to the
cavity of the heart,--a conceit altogether of such refined manufacture
and ingenuity of design, as to remind us of the saying of Cicero, that
there is an exquisiteness in art which never can be known till it is
seen fresh from the hand of genius.
"And who ordered that beautiful thing?" inquired Rachel.
"Walter Grierson," replied Paul, fixing his eyes upon her sorrowfully,
as if he felt oppressed by that gloomy theory of his.
Nor did he fail to perceive the effect his few words had produced upon
the heart of his cousin, where there was a fluttering very different
from that of cooing turtles; for the fate of her happiness seemed to her
to be suspended on the answer to a question, and that question she was
afraid to put.
"Be patient, and learn to hear," continued the little philosopher. "Ere
yet Cheops built the Pyramids, or Joshua commanded the sun to stand
still, yea, before the first sensation tingled in the first nerve made
out of the dust, the beginnings were laid of these events of this day
and hour, and, in particular, of that one which may well astonish you
and grieve you--viz., that the locket is intended for and inscribed to
Agnes Ainslie."
"Agnes Ainslie!" repeated Rachel, with parched lips and trembling
voice, "the daughter of Mr. John Ainslie, my father's agent, to whom I
am even now going, by Mr. Grierson's command, to request him to call to
morrow for the purpose of preparing the settlement!"
"A strange perplexity of events," said Paul. "But what is this mingling
of threads to the great web of the universe, which is eternally being
woven and unwoven, unaffected by the will of man? And then these small
issues, the loss of a fortune by a man, and that of a lover by a woman,
how mighty they are to the individual hearts and affections!"
"Mighty indeed," sobbed Rachel, who had loved Walter so long, and
rejoiced to have it in her power to bestow a fortune upon him, and now
found all her hopes dissolved into the ashes of grief and
disappointment. "Mighty indeed; and these thoughts of yours are so
dreary, how can one believe in them and live!"
"We are compelled to live," replied he, "even by that same decree which
binds us to the infinite chain. Were it not so, man would imitate the
day-flies, and die at sundown, that he might escape the dark night which
reveals to him the mystery of his being, whereat he trembles and sobs;
and all this is also in the decree."
"But if all these things are so," said Rachel, "what do you say of
happiness? Is there no joy in the world? Are not the birds happy, when
in the morning the woods resound with their song, and so, too, every
animal after its kind? Are not children joyful when the house rings with
their mirth? and have not men and women their pleasures of a thousand
kinds? nay, might not I myself have been one of the happiest of beings,
if, with the fortune which is to be left to me, that locket had been
engraved with the name of Rachel Grierson in place of Agnes Ainslie?"
"Yes," replied he, "happiness is in the decree as well; and," he added
with a smile, "it is always cropping out around us, but no one can
manufacture the article. If you wait for it, you may feel it; if you run
after it, you will probably not find it, because it is not ready by
those eternal laws which, at their beginning, involved its coming up at
a certain moment of long after-years. Then, at the best, pleasure and
pain are mere oscillations; but the first movement is downwards, for we
cry when we come into the world; and the last is also downwards, for we
groan when we go out of it. It is the old rhyme--
'We scream when we're born,
We groan when we're dying;
And all that's between
Is but laughing and crying.'"
A parade of philosophy all this which at another time might have had but
a small effect upon a youthful mind, but Rachel was in the meantime
occupied by looking at the inscription on the fatal toy; and we all know
that the feeling of the dominant idea of the moment assimilates to its
own hue the light or shade of all other ideas of a cognate kind; and
there is in this process also a selection and rejection whereby all
melancholy ideas cluster in the gloomy atmosphere, if we may so term it,
of the prevailing depression, and all joyful ones come together by the
attraction of a joyful thought; and so Rachel was impressed by views
which, if they had been modified by the comforting doctrines of
Christianity, might have enabled her at once to bear and to hope. Even
when Paul had finished, she was still gazing on the locket. A moment or
two more, and she laid it down with a deep sigh, saying, almost
involuntarily, "If my name had been there, I would not have repined at
the loss of all my expected fortune." Then, shaking hands with this
peculiar being, whom she could not but respect for his ingenuity, as
well as for a kindliness and sympathy which lay at the bottom of all his
abstract theories, she left him to his work, at which he would continue
till drowsiness made, as he said, the idea dim and the nerve thick.