"To-morrow," said the kind surgeon--a man of few words.
She and James and Rab and I retired. I noticed that he and she spoke a
little, but seemed to anticipate everything in each other. The following
day at noon, the students came in, hurrying up the great stair. At the
first landing-place, on a small well-known blackboard, was a bit of
paper fastened by wafers and many remains of old wafers beside it. On
the paper were the words--"An operation to-day. J. B., _Clerk_."
Up ran the youths, eager to secure good places; in they crowded, full of
interest and talk.
"What's the case? Which side is it?"
Don't think them heartless; they are neither better nor worse than you
or I; they get over their professional horrors, and into their proper
work; and in them pity--as an _emotion_, ending in itself or at best in
tears and a long-drawn breath, lessens, while pity as a _motive_ is
quickened, and gains power and purpose. It is well for poor human
nature that it is so.
The operating theatre is crowded; much talk and fun, and all the
cordiality and stir of youth. The surgeon with his staff of assistants
is there. In comes Ailie; one look at her quiets and abates the eager
students. The beautiful old woman is too much for them. They sit down,
and are dumb, and gaze at her. These rough boys feel the power of her
presence.
She walks in quickly, but without haste; dressed in her mutch, her
neckerchief, her white dimity short-gown, her black bombazine petticoat,
showing her white worsted stockings and her carpet-shoes. Behind her was
James with Rab. James sat down in the distance, and took that huge and
noble head between his knees. Rab looked perplexed and dangerous;
forever cocking his ear and dropping it as fast.
Ailie stepped up on a seat, and laid herself on the table, as her friend
the surgeon told her; arranged herself, gave a rapid look at James, shut
her eyes, rested herself on me, and took my hand. The operation was at
once begun; it was necessarily slow; and chloroform--one of God's best
gifts to his suffering children--was then unknown. The surgeon did his
work. Rab's soul was working within him; he saw that something strange
was going on--blood flowing from his mistress, and she suffering; his
ragged ear was up, and importunate; he growled and gave now and then a
sharp impatient yelp; he would have liked to have done something to that
man. But James had him firm, and gave him a _glower_[109-2] from time to
time, and an intimation of a possible kick;--all the better for James,
it kept his eye and his mind off Ailie.
It is over; she is dressed, steps gently and decently down from the
table, looks for James; then, turning to the surgeon and the students,
she curtsies--and in a low, clear voice, begs their pardon if she has
behaved ill. The students--all of us--wept like children; the surgeon
happed her up carefully--and, resting on James and me, Ailie went to her
room, Rab following. We put her to bed. James took off his heavy shoes,
crammed with tackets, heel-capt and toe-capt, and put them carefully
under the table, saying, "Maister John, I'm for nane o' yer strynge
nurse bodies for Ailie. I'll be her nurse, and I'll gang about on my
stockin' soles as canny as pussy."
And so he did; handy and clever, and swift and tender as any woman, was
that horny-handed, snell, peremptory little man. Everything she got he
gave her; he seldom slept; and often I saw his small, shrewd eyes out of
the darkness, fixed on her. As before, they spoke little.
Rab behaved well, never moving, showing us how meek and gentle he could
be, and occasionally, in his sleep, letting us know that he was
demolishing some adversary. He took a walk with me every day, generally
to the Candlemaker Row; but he was sombre and mild; declined doing
battle, though some fit cases offered, and indeed submitted to sundry
indignities; and was always very ready to turn and came faster back, and
trotted up the stair with much lightness, and went straight to that
door.
Jess, the mare, had been sent, with her weather-worn cart, to Howgate,
and had doubtless her own dim and placid meditations and confusions, on
the absence of her master and Rab, and her unnatural freedom from the
road and her cart.
For some days Ailie did well. The wound healed "by the first intention;"
for as James said, "Our Ailie's skin's ower clean to beil." The students
came in quiet and anxious, and surrounded her bed. She said she liked to
see their young, honest faces. The surgeon dressed her, and spoke to her
in his own short, kind way, pitying her through his eyes, Rab and James
outside the circle--Rab being now reconciled, and even cordial, and
having made up his mind that as yet nobody required worrying, but as you
may suppose _semper paratus_.[111-3]
So far well; but four days after the operation my patient had a sudden
and long shivering, a "groosin'," as she called it. I saw her soon
after; her eyes were too bright, her cheek colored; she was restless,
and ashamed of being so; the balance was lost; mischief had begun.
On looking at the wound, a blush of red told the secret; her pulse was
rapid, her breathing anxious and quick, she wasn't herself, as she said,
and was vexed at her restlessness. We tried what we could, James did
everything, was everywhere; never in the way, never out of it. Rab
subsided under the table into a dark place, and was motionless, all but
his eye, which followed every one. Ailie got worse; began to wander in
her mind, gently; was more demonstrative in her ways to James, rapid in
her questions, and sharp at times. He was vexed, and said, "She was
never that way afore; no, never."
For a time she knew her head was wrong, and was always asking our
pardon--the dear, gentle old woman; then delirium set in strong, without
pause. Her brain gave way, and then came that terrible spectacle,
"The intellectual power, through words and things,
Went sounding on its dim and perilous way;"
she sang bits of old songs and psalms, stopping suddenly, mingling the
Psalms of David, and the diviner words of his Son and Lord, with homely
odds and ends and scraps of ballads.
Nothing more touching, or in a sense more strangely beautiful, did I
ever witness. Her tremulous, rapid, affectionate, eager, Scotch
voice--the swift, aimless, bewildered mind, the baffled utterance, the
bright and perilous eye; some wild words, some household cares,
something for James, the names of the dead, Rab called rapidly and in a
"fremyt"[112-4] voice, and he starting up, surprised, and slinking off
as if he were to blame somehow, or had been dreaming he heard. Many
eager questions and beseechings which James and I could make nothing of,
and on which she seemed to set her all, and then sink back ununderstood.
It was very sad, but better than many things that are not called sad.
James hovered about, put out and miserable, but active and exact as
ever; read to her, when there was a lull, short bits from the Psalms,
prose and metre, chanting the latter in his own rude and serious way,
showing great knowledge of the fit words, bearing up like a man, and
doating over her as his "ain Ailie," "Ailie, ma woman!" "Ma ain bonnie
wee dawtie!"
The end was drawing on: the golden bowl was breaking; the silver cord
was fast being loosed--that _animula blandula, vagula, hospes,
comesque_[113-5] was about to flee. The body and the soul--companions
for sixty years--were being sundered, and taking leave. She was walking,
alone, through the valley of that shadow, into which one day we must all
enter--and yet she was not alone, for we knew whose rod and staff were
comforting her.
One night she had fallen quiet, and as we hoped, asleep; her eyes were
shut. We put down the gas and sat watching her. Suddenly she sat up in
bed, and taking a bedgown which was lying on it rolled up, she held it
eagerly to her breast--to the right side. We could see her eyes bright
with surpassing tenderness and joy, bending over this bundle of clothes.
She held it as a woman holds her sucking child; opening out her
nightgown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and
murmuring foolish little words, as one whom his mother comforteth, and
who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her
wasting dying look, keen and yet vague--her immense love.
"Preserve me!" groaned James, giving away. And then she rocked back and
forward, as if to make it sleep, hushing it, and wasting on it her
infinite fondness.
"Wae's me, doctor; I declare she's thinkin' it's that bairn."
"What bairn?"
"The only bairn we ever had; our wee Mysie, and she's in the Kingdom,
forty years and mair."
It was plainly true: the pain in the breast telling its urgent story to
a bewildered, ruined brain, was misread, and mistaken; it suggested to
her the uneasiness of a breast full of milk, and then the child; and so
again once more they were together, and she had her ain wee Mysie in her
bosom.
This was the close. She sank rapidly: the delirium left her; but, as she
whispered, she was "clean silly"; it was the lightening before the final
darkness. After having for some time lain still--her eyes shut, she
said, "James!"
He came close to her, and lifting up her calm, clear, beautiful eyes,
she gave him a long look, turned to me kindly but shortly, looked for
Rab but could not see him, then turned to her husband again, as if she
would never leave off looking, shut her eyes and composed herself. She
lay for some time breathing quick, and passed away so gently, that when
we thought she was gone, James, in his old-fashioned way, held the
mirror to her face. After a long pause, one small spot of dimness was
breathed out; it vanished away, and never returned, leaving the blank
clear darkness of the mirror without a stain. "What is your life? it is
even a vapor, which appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth
away."
Rab all this time had been full awake and motionless; he came forward
beside us; Ailie's hand, which James had held, was hanging down; it was
soaked with his tears; Rab licked it all over carefully, looked at her,
and returned to his place under the table.
James and I sat, I don't know how long, but for some time--saying
nothing: he started up, abruptly, and with some noise went to the table,
and putting his right fore and middle fingers each into a shoe, pulled
them out, and put them on, breaking one of the leather latchets, and
muttering in anger, "I never did the like o' that afore."
I believe he never did; nor after either. "Rab!" he said roughly, and
pointing with his thumb to the bottom of the bed. Rab leaped up, and
settled himself; his head and eye to the dead face. "Maister John, ye'll
wait for me," said the carrier, and disappeared in the darkness,
thundering downstairs in his heavy shoes. I ran to a front window: there
he was, already round the house, and out at the gate fleeing like a
shadow.
I was afraid about him, and yet not afraid; so I sat down beside Rab,
and being wearied, fell asleep. I awoke from a sudden noise outside. It
was November, and there had been a heavy fall of snow. Rab was _in statu
quo_;[115-6] he heard the noise too, and plainly knew it, but never
moved. I looked out, and there, at the gate, in the dim morning--for the
sun was not up--was Jess and the cart--a cloud of steam rising from the
old mare. I did not see James; he was already at the door, and came up
to the stairs, and met me. It was less than three hours since he left,
and he must have posted out--who knows how--to Howgate, full nine miles
off; yoked Jess, and driven her astonished into town. He had an armful
of blankets, and was streaming with perspiration. He nodded to me,
spread out on the floor two pairs of clean old blankets, having at their
corners "A. G., 1794," in large letters in red worsted. These were the
initials of Alison Græme, and James may have looked in at her from
without--himself unseen but not unthought of--when he was "wat, wat and
weary," and after having walked many a mile over the hills, may have
seen her sitting, while "a' the lave were sleepin';" and by the
firelight working her name on the blankets, for her ain James' bed.
He motioned Rab down, and taking his wife in his arms, laid her in the
blankets, and happed her carefully and firmly up, leaving the face
uncovered; and then lifting her, he nodded again sharply to me, and with
a resolved but utterly miserable face, strode along the passage, and
downstairs, followed by Rab. I followed with a light; but he didn't need
it. I went out, holding stupidly the candle in my hand in the calm
frosty air; we were soon at the gate. I could have helped him, but I saw
he was not to be meddled with, and he was strong, and did not need it.
He laid her down as tenderly, as safely, as he had lifted her out ten
days before--as tenderly as when he had her first in his arms when she
was only "A. G."--sorted her, leaving that beautiful sealed face open to
the heavens; and then taking Jess by the head, he moved away. He did not
notice me, neither did Rab, who presided behind the cart.
I stood till they passed through the long shadow of the College, and
turned up Nicholson Street. I heard the solitary cart sound through the
streets, and die away and come again; and I returned, thinking of that
company going up Libberton Brae, then along Roslin Muir, the morning
light touching the Pentlands and making them on-looking ghosts; then
down the hill through Auchindinny woods, past "haunted Woodhouselee";
and as daybreak came sweeping up the bleak Lammermuirs, and fell on his
own door, the company would stop, and James would take the key, and
lift Ailie up again, laying her on her own bed, and, having put Jess up,
would return with Rab and shut the door.
[Illustration: JAMES BURIED HIS WIFE]
James buried his wife, with his neighbors mourning, Rab inspecting the
solemnity from a distance. It was snow, and that black ragged hole would
look strange in the midst of the swelling spotless cushion of white.
James looked after everything; then rather suddenly fell ill, and took
to bed; was insensible when the doctor came, and soon died. A sort of
low fever was prevailing in the village, and his want of sleep, his
exhaustion, and his misery, made him apt to take it. The grave was not
difficult to reopen. A fresh fall of snow had again made all things
white and smooth; Rab once more looked on, and slunk home to the
stable.
And what of Rab? I asked for him next week of the new carrier who got
the goodwill of James's business, and was now master of Jess and her
cart.
"How's Rab?"
He put me off, and said rather rudely, "What's _your_ business wi' the
dowg?"