on the implied condition of a similar one for all on another occasion.
They went, or, as the phrase is often, sallied forth. The night had now
come down with her black shadows. There was no moon. She was dispensing
her favours among savages in another hemisphere, who, savages though
they were, might have their devotions to their strange gods, resident
with her up yonder, where no robbery is, save that of light from the
pure fountain of heat and life. Yes, the darkness was auspicious to
folly, as it often is to vice; and there was quietness too--no winds
abroad to speak voices through rustling leaves, to terrify the criminal
from his wild rebellion against the peace of nature. No night could have
suited them better. Yes, all was favourable but God; and Him these wild
youths had offended, as disobedient sons of poor parents, who had
educated them well--as rebellious citizens among a society which would
have hailed them as ornaments--as despisers of God's temple, where grace
was held out to them and spurned.
They were now upon the low road leading parallel to the beach, and
towards the end of Inverleith Row. Nor had the devil left them with the
deserted toddy-bowl. There was still pride for S----th, and for the
others the rankling sense of inferiority in talent and of injury from
scorching irony. Nor had they proceeded two miles, till the fatal
opportunity loomed in the dark, in the form of a figure coming up from
Leith or Edinburgh.
Now, S----th;
Now, the cowardly Cartouche;
Now, the poltroon Rob Roy;
Now, the braggart Wallace!
But S----th did not need the taunts, nor, though many a patriotic cause
wanted such a youth, was he left for other work, that night of
devil-worship. The figure approached. Alas! the work so easy. S----th
was right; how easy and cowardly, where the stranger was, in the
confidence of his own heart, unprepared, unweaponed! Yet those who urged
him on leapt a dyke.
"Stand and deliver!" said S----th, with a handkerchief over his face.
"God help me!" cried the man, in a fit of newborn fear. "I'm a father,
have wife and bairns; but I canna spare my life to a highwayman. Here,
here, here."
And fumbling nervously in his pocket, and shaking all over, not at all
like the old object of similitude, but rather like a branch of a tree
driven by the wind, he thrust something into S----th's hand, and rushing
past him, was off on the road homewards. Nor was it a quick walk under
fear, but a run, as if he thought he was or would be pursued for his
life, or brought down by the long range of the gun he had seen in the
hands of the robber.
Yes, it was easily done, and it was done; but how to be undone at a time
when the craving maw of the noose dangled from the post, in obedience to
the Procrustes of the time!
And S----th felt it was done. His hand still held what the man had
pushed into it, but by-and-by it was as fire. His brain reeled; he
staggered, and would have fallen, but for S----k, who, leaping the dyke,
came behind him.
"What luck?"
"This," said S----th,--"the price of my life," throwing on the ground
the paper roll.
"Pound-notes," cried S----k, taking them up. "One, two, three, four,
five; more than sixpence."
"Where is the man?" cried S----th, as, seizing the notes from the hands
of S----k, he turned round. Then, throwing down the gun, he set off
after his victim; but the latter was now ahead, though his pursuer heard
the clatter of his heavy shoes on the metal road.
"Ho, there! stop! 'twas a joke--a bet."
No answer, and couldn't be. The man naturally thought the halloo was for
further compulsion, under the idea that he had more to give, and on he
sped with increased celerity and terror; nor is it supposed that he
stopt till he got to his own house, a mile beyond Davidson's Mains.
Smith gave up the pursuit, and with the notes in his hand, ready to be
cast away at every exacerbation of his fear, returned to his cowardly
companions with hanging head and, if they had seen, with eyes rolling,
as if he did not know where to look or what to do.
"What is to be done?" he cried; and his fears shook the others.
"Yes, what is to be done? You urged me on. Try to help me out. Let us go
back and seek out this man. To-morrow it may be too late, when the
police have had this robbery in their hands as a thing intended."
"We could not find the man though we went back," said S----k. And his
companions agreed.
But W----pe, who had some acquaintanceship with the police Captain
Stewart, proposed that they should proceed homewards, go to him, give
him the money, and tell the story out.
"That, I fear, would be putting one's hand in the mouth of the hyaena at
the moment he is laughing with hunger, as they say he does."
An opinion which S----th feared was too well founded. Nearly at their
wits' end, they stood all three for a little quite silent, till the
sound of a horse's clattering feet sounded as if coming from Davidson's
Mains. All under the conviction of crime, they became alarmed; and as
the rider approached, they concealed themselves behind the dyke, which
ran by the side of the road. At that moment a man came as if from
Edinburgh, and they could hear the rider, who did not, from his voice,
appear to be the man who had been robbed, inquiring if he had met a
young man with a gun in his hand. The man answered no, and off set the
rider towards town at the rate of a hard trot. The few hopeful moments
when anything could have been done effectually as a palinode and
expiation were past; and S----th, releaping the dyke, was again upon
the road in the depth of despair, and his companions scarcely less so.
All his and their escapades had hitherto been at least within the bounds
of the law; and though his heart had often misgiven him, when called
upon for the nourishment of his wild humours, as he thought of his
widowed mother at home, without the comfort of the son she loved in
spite of his errors, he had not ever yet felt the pangs of deep regret
as they came preluding amendment. A terrible influx of feelings, which
had been accumulating almost unknown to him during months and
months--for his father had been dead only for a year and a half--pushed
up against all the strainings of a wild natural temperament, and seemed
ready to choke him, depriving him of utterance, and making him appear
the very coward he had been depicting so sharply an hour before. A deep
gloom fell over him; nor was this rendered less inspissated by the
recollection that came quick as lightning, that he was the only one
known to the mistress of the inn. And now, worse and worse--for the same
power that sent him that conviction threw a suspicion over his mind
which made him strike his forehead with an energy alarming to his
companions--no other--"O, merciful God!" he muttered--than that the man
he had robbed was his maternal uncle; the only man among the friends of
either his father or his mother who had shown any sympathy to the
bereaved family, who had fed them and kept them from starvation, and by
whom he had been himself nourished. He had no power to speak this: it
was one of those thoughts that scathe the nerves that serve the tongue,
and which flit and burn, and will not ameliorate their fierceness by the
common means given to man in mercy. It now appeared to him as something
miraculous why he did not recognise him; but the occasion was one of
hurry and confusion, and so completely oblivious had he been in the
agony which came on him in an instant, that he even thought that at the
very moment he knew him, looking darkly, as he did, through the
handkerchief over his eyes. In his despair, he meditated hurrying to
Leith, and with the five pounds getting a passage over the sea
somewhere, it signified nothing where, if away from the scene of his
crime and ingratitude; and this resolution was confirmed by the
additional thought that Mr. Henderson, however good and generous, was a
stern man--so stern, that he had ten years before given up a beloved son
into the hands of justice for stealing; yea, stern _ex corde_ as Cato,
if generous _ex crumena_ as Codrus.
This resolution for a time brought back his love of freedom and
adventure. He would go to Hudson's Bay, and shoot bears or set traps for
wild silver-foxes, that would bring him gold; or to Buenos Ayres, and
catch the wild horse with the lasso; or to Lima, and become a soldier of
fortune, and slay men with the sword. The gleam of wild hope was
shortlived--his triumph over his present ill a temporary hallucination.
The laurel is the only tree which burns and crackles when green. The
intention fled, as once more the thought of his mother came, with that
vigour which was only of half an hour's birth, and begotten by young
conscience on old neglect. They had been trailing their legs along till
they came to Inverleith Row, where he behoved to have left his
companions, if his resolution lasted; for the road there goes straight
on to Leith Harbour. He hesitated, and made an effort; but S----k, who
knew him, and fancied from the wild look of his eye that he meditated
throwing himself into the deep harbour of Leith, took him by an arm,
motioning to W----pe to take the other, and thus by a very small
effort--for really his resolution had departed, and his mind, so far as
his intention went, was gone--they half forced him up the long row. When
they arrived at Canonmills, here is the rider again, hurrying on: he had
executed his commission, whatever it was, and was galloping home. But
the moment he came forward, he pulled up. He had, by a glance under the
light of a lamp, caught a sight of the gun in the hands of S----k, who
had carried it when he took S----th's arm. The man shouted to a
policeman,
"Seize that robber!"
"Which of them?"
"Him with the gun."
And in an instant the cowardly dog who had done the whole business was
laid hold of.
"The gun is mine," cried S----th. "It is I who am answerable for
whatever was done by him who carried that weapon. Take me, and let the
innocent off. I say this young man is innocent."
"Very gallant and noble," said the man; "but when we go to the hills, we
like the deer that bears the horns."
"We are up to them tricks," said the policeman. And S----k is borne
along, with courage, if he ever had any, gone, and his eye looking
terror.
S----th wanted to go along with him; but W----pe seized him by the arm
again and dragged him up by the east side of Huntly Street, whereby they
could get easily to James' Square.
In a few minutes more S----th was at his mother's door with the burning
five pounds in his pocket. He had meditated throwing it away, but the
hurrying concourse of thoughts had prevented the insufficient remedy
from being carried into effect. When he opened the door he found his
mother alone. The sister had not yet come from the warehouse where she
earned five shillings a week, almost the only source of her and the
mother's living; for the money which S----th earned as a mere copying
clerk in a writer's office, went mostly in some other direction. The
mother soon observed, as she cast her eye over him, that there was
something more than ordinary out of even his irregular way. He was pale,
woe-worn, haggard; nor did he seem able to stand, but hurried to a chair
and flung himself down, uttering confusedly, "Something to drink,
mother----whisky."
"I hae nane, Charlie, lad," said she. "Never hae I passed a day like
this since your father died. I have na e'en got the bit meat that a' get
that are under God's protection. But what ails ye, dear Charlie?"
"Never mind me," replied the youth in choking accents. "I am better.
Starving, starving! O God! and my doing. Yes, I am better--a bitter
cure--starving," he again muttered; and searching his pockets, and
throwing the five pounds on the table--"There, there, there," he added.
The mother took up the notes, and counted them slowly; for she had been
inured to grief, and was always calm, even when her heart beat fast with
the throbs of anguish.
"And whaur fae, laddie?" she said, as she turned her grey eye and
scanned deeply the pale face of her son.
Silent, even dogged! Where now his metaphysics, his gibes on the
physicalities, the moralities, the spiritualities?--all bundled up in a
vibrating chord.
"Whaur fae, Charlie," had she repeated, still looking at him.
"The devil!" cried he, stung by her searching look, which brought back a
gleam of the old rebellion.
"A gude paymaster to his servants," she said; "but I'm no ane o' them
yet; and may the Lord, wham I serve, even while his chastening hand is
heavy upon me, preserve me frae his bribes!" And laying down the notes,
she added, not lightly, as it might seem, but seriously, yet quietly,
"Nae wonder they're warm."
The notes had carried the heat of his burning hand.
"The auld story--billiards," said she again; "for they are the devil's
cue and balls."
No answer; and the mother seating herself again, looked stedfastly and
suspiciously at him; but she could not catch the eye of her son, who sat
doggedly determined not to reveal his secret, and as determined also to
elude her looks, searching as they were, and sufficient to enter his
very soul. Yet she loved him too well to objurgate where she was only as
yet suspicious; and in the quietness of the hour, she fell for a moment
into her widowed habit of speaking as if none were present but herself.
"Wharfor bore I him--wharfor toiled and wrought for him for sae mony
years, since the time he sat on my knee smiling in my face, as if he
said, I will comfort you when you are old, and will be your stay and
support? Was that smile then a lee, put there by the devil, wha has
gi'en him the money to deceive me again?"
Then she paused.
"And how could that be? Love is not a cheat; and did ever bairn love a
mither as he loved me? or did ever mither love her bairn as I hae loved
him? Lord, deliver him frae his enemies, and mak him what he was in thae
bygone days--sae innocent, sae cheerful, sae obedient; and I will meekly
suffer a' Thou canst lay upon me."
The words reached the ears of the son, and the audible sobs seemed to
startle the solemn spirit of the hour and the place. "What would she
say," he thought, "if she heard me declare I had robbed my uncle?"
At that moment the door opened, and in rushed little Jeanie
S----th,--her face pale, and her blue eyes lighted with fear, and the
thin delicate nostril distended, and hissing with her quick
breathings,--
"Oh mither, there's twa officers on the stair seeking Charlie!"
And the quick creature, darting her eye on the table where the notes
lay, snatched them up, and secreted them in her bosom; and, what was
more extraordinary, just as if she had divined something more from her
brother's looks, which told her that that money would be sought for by
these officers, she darted off like a bird with a crumb in its bill,
which it has picked up from beneath your eyes; but not before
depositing, as she passed, a paper on a chair near the door.
"That creature is a spirit," said the mother. "She sees the evil in the
dark before it comes, and wards it off like a guardian angel; but oh!
she has little in her power to be an angel."
And rising, she took up the paper. It was only some bread and cheese,
which the girl, knowing the privations of her mother, had bought with a
part of her five shillings a week.
Thereafter, just as little Jeannie had intimated, came in two officers,
with the usual looks of duty appearing through their professional
sorrow.
"We want your son, good woman."
"He is there," said she; "but what want ye him for?"
"Not for going to church," said the man, forgetting said professional
sorrow in his love of a joke, "but for robbery on the highway; and we
must search the house for five pounds in British Linen Company notes."
And the men proceeded to search, even putting their hands in the
mother's pockets, besides rifling those of the son. They of course found
nothing except the powder and shot, which had still remained there, and
a handkerchief.
"That is something, anyhow," said one of the men, "and a great deal too.
The one who is up in the office says true; he was not the man."
"No more he was," said Charles. "I am the man you ought to take; and
take me."
"Sae, sae; just as I suspected," muttered the mother. "Lord, Lord! the
cup runs over. It was e'en lipping when John died; but I will bear yet."
And she seemed to grasp firmly the back of a chair, and compressed her
lips--an attitude she maintained like a statue all the time occupied by
the departure of her son. The door closed--he was gone; and she still
stood, the _vivum cadaver_--the image of a petrified creature of misery.
Yet, overcome as her very calmness was, and enchanted for the moment
into voicelessness and utter inaction, she was not that kind of women
who sit and bear the stripes without an effort to ward them off. If
Jeannie was as quick as lightning, she was sure as that which follows
the flash. She thought for a moment, "God does not absolutely and for
ever leave his servants." Some thought had struck her. She put on her
bonnet and cloak deliberately, even looking into the glass to see if she
was tidy enough for where she intended going, and for whom she intended
to see.
And now this quiet woman is on her way down Broughton Street at twelve
o'clock of a cold winter night, which, like her own mind, had only that
calmness which results from the exhaustion of sudden biting gusts from
the north, and therefore right in her face. She drew her cloak round
her. She had a long way to go, but her son was in danger of the gallows;
and thoughtless, and as it now seemed, wicked as he was, he was yet her
_son_. The very word is a volume of heart language--not the fitful
expression of passion, but that quiet eloquence which bedews the eye and
brings deep sighs with holy recollections of the child-time, and
germinating hopes of future happiness up to the period when he would
hang over her departing spirit. Much of all that had gone, and been
replaced by dark forebodings of the future; and now there was before her
the vision of an ignominious death as the termination of all these holy
inspirations. But her faithful saying was always, "Wait, hope, and
persevere;" and the saying was muttered a hundred times as she trudged
weariedly, oh! how weariedly, for one who had scarcely tasted food for
that day, and who had left untouched the gift brought by her loving
daughter that night--for which, plain as it was, her heart yearned even
amidst its grief, yea, though grief is said, untruly no doubt, to have
no appetite. Perhaps not to those who are well fed; but nature is
stronger than even grief, and she now felt the consequence of her
disobedience to her behests in her shaking limbs and fainting heart. Yet
she trudged and trudged on, shutting her mouth against her empty stomach
to keep out the cold north wind. She is at the foot of Inverleith Row,
and her face is to the west; she will now escape the desultory blasts by
keeping close by the long running dyke. She passes the scene of the
robbery without knowing it; else, doubtless, she would have stood and
examined it by those instincts that force the spirit to such modes of
satisfaction, as if the inanimate thing could calm the spiritual. She
was now drawing to Davidson's Mains: a little longer, and much past
midnight, she was rapping, still in her quiet way, at the door of her
brother.
The family had had something else to do than to sleep. There were the
sounds of tongues and high words. Mrs. S----th was surprised, as well
she might; for though sometimes Mr. Henderson partook freely of the
bottle when he met old friends in town, he and the whole household were
peaceable, orderly, and early goers to bed. The door was opened almost
upon the instant; and Mrs. S----th was presently before Mr. Henderson
and two others, one of whom held in his hand a whip.
"What has brought you here, Margaret, at this hour?"
"I want to speak privately to you."
"Just here; out with it," said he. "These are my friends; and if it is
more money you want, you have come at an unlucky time, for I have been
robbed by a villain of five pounds, which I could ill spare."
Mrs. S----th's heart died away within her. She clenched her hands to
keep her from shaking; for she recollected the old story about his own
son--a story which had got him the character of being harsh and
unnatural. She could not mention her errand, which was nothing else than
to induce her brother to use his influence in some way to get Charles
out of the hands of the law. She could not utter even the word Charles,
and all she could say was--
"Robbed!"
"Ay, robbed by a villain, whom I shall hang three cubits higher than
Haman."
And the stern man even laughed at the thought of retribution. Yet,
withal, no man could deny his generosity and general kindliness, if,
even immediately after, he did not show it by slipping a pound into the
hands of his needy sister.
"There," said he; "no more at present. I will call up and see you
to-morrow morning, as I go to the police office to identify the villain.
Meantime, take a dram, dear Peggy, and get home to bed. The night is
cold, and see that you wrap yourself well up to keep _out_ the wind and
_in_ the spirit; it's good whisky."
Shortly afterwards she was on her way home, with more than blasted hopes
of what she had travelled for.
His uncle the man he had robbed! Even with all her forced composedness,
this seemed too much--ay, so much too much, that she was totally
overpowered. She paused to recover strength; and, looking forward, saw a
thin flying shadow coming up to her, with a shriek of delight; and
immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little
Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were--so agile, so quick, so
Protean--appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the
postures and gestures of a creature appearing in a dream.
"Oh, I know all," she cried; "don't speak--nay, wait now till I return."
And the creature was off like a September meteor disappearing in the
west, as if to make up again to the sun, far down away behind the hills
from whence it had been struck off in the height of the day.
What can the strange creature mean? But she had had experience of her,
and knew the instinctive divination that got at objects and results
where reason in full-grown man would syllogize into the darkness of
despair.
Nor was it long before she is running back, leaping with all the
_abandon_ of a romp, crying--
"I will save dear Charlie yet; for I love him as much as I hate that old
curmudgeon."
"What does the girl mean? Whaur was you, bairn?" said her mother.
"Oh mother, how cold it is for you! Wrap the cloak about you."
"But what _is_ it that you mean, Jeannie?"
"We shall be home by-and-by; come."
And, putting an arm round her mother's waist, she impelled her forward
with the strength of her wythe of an arm.
"Come, come, there are ghosts about these woods;" and then she cowered,
but still impelled.
Nor did the mother press the question she had already put twice; for, as
we have said, she knew the nature of the girl, who ever took her own
way, and had the art to make that way either filial obedience or loving
conciliation.
"Oh, I'm so frightened for these ghosts!" she continued. "You know there
was a murder here once upon a time. They're so like myself--wicked, and
won't answer when they're spoken to, as I would not answer you, dear
mother, just now; but wait till to-morrow, and you shall see that I am
your own loving Jeannie."
"Weel, weel, bairn, we _will_ see. But, oh, I'm muckle afraid; d'ye
know, Jeannie, Charlie has been robbing! And wha, think ye, was the
man--wha but--"
"Hush, hush, mother, I know it all already; but let me beneath your
cloak, I'm so frightened."
And the little sprite got in, keeping her head and the little cup of a
bonnet protruding every moment to look round; yet if it could have been
seen in the dark, with such a sly, half-humorous eye, as betokened one
of those curiously-made creatures who seem to be formed for studies to
the thoroughgoing decent pacers of the world's stage.
"Ah! now we're all safe, as poor Charlie will be to-morrow," she cried,
as they got to the foot of the long row, and she emerged in the light of
one of the lamps, so like a flash from a cloud, running before her
mother to get her to walk faster and faster, as if some scheme she had
in her head was loitering under the impediment of her mother's wearied,
oh, wearied step.