young, a somewhat solitary man in circumstances, perhaps by inclination
as well. He was the last living representative of a good old family in
the south of Scotland, which had, by a series of misfortunes, political
and other, lost lands and houses, and now threatened itself to
disappear. An orphan since his infancy, Herries had been destined by
his guardians for the army, but a constitutional delicacy showed itself
early in the lad, and such a career became manifestly unadvisable,
though all his dreams and ambitions, as a boy, were centred round it.
He was bidden to fix his thoughts on the law, then considered perhaps
the most highly respectable profession in Scotland, and it was intended
that he should be called to the Bar as an advocate. But here again his
unlucky star intervened, for Herries soon found himself wanting in those
very qualities of brilliance and assurance which alone can lead to
distinction in such a career. The more sober avenues of the law
remained open to him, and these he finally entered and pursued. His
circumstances--he had inherited a modest but certain income--made his
entry into a good legal house, first as a subordinate and finally as a
partner, secure; and from that point onward his success was solid,
progressive, and, indeed, distinguished. Intellectually well-balanced,
shrewd, long-headed, prudent, and not a little cold, Herries at thirty,
had all the weighty qualities of character essential in the best class
of family lawyer. The heads of his firm retired, but not a client
deserted him, and he had, at this time, when he was about thirty-three,
perhaps one of the most extended legal concerns in Scotland--a business
worth many thousands of pounds. He had taken as partner a very
respectable man of the name of Creighton, much older than himself, who
had been senior and confidential clerk of the firm for over thirty
years. Mr. Creighton occupied lodgings of his own, from which he daily
came and went; but Herries lived in the fine modern George Street
mansion, which he had bought, in solitary state, but for his old
housekeeper and a valet. Creighton had his office in one of the rooms by
day, and four clerks did their work in yet another. It was a most
substantial establishment, already one of the landmarks of New
Edinburgh. In the eyes of the world, Herries was indeed a successful
person. Yet he carried, locked in his bosom, that sense of failure and
disappointment which dogs a sensitive man, who pursues an uncongenial
occupation, and succeeds, yet without attaining a single desire of his
heart.
Socially, Herries had the Edinburgh world at his feet. He bore a good
name, he was a rising man, and had a pleasing person and gentlemanly
address. Caps were set at the successful young lawyer, naturally. But
Herries, though not averse to occasional dalliance, was hardly a lady's
man. One winter, indeed, a great beauty took the town by storm, and
Herries did a little more than dangle in her train, and got a little
more, too, than mere crumbs from her table. But the beauty, though she
weighed him in the balance, found him wanting, and married a title. It
was a disappointment to ambition--the wish to win and wear what all men
coveted--rather than to love; yet it had been a shock, too, that drove
further inward the already inward nature of the man. He had buckled to
his business after it with a more dogged exclusiveness than ever.
Preoccupied, as usual, Herries walked rapidly down towards the New Town,
his thoughts busy for the moment with the children from whom he had just
parted. As he rounded a corner, with bent head, he knocked up against a
man, who seemed to be loitering on the causeway, none too respectably,
with a woman. The figure of the man was big and burly, and he had a
countryman's plaid about his shoulders. The woman was of the poorest
class, of a tall figure, in a draggled cotton gown, a shawl drawn over
her head. She seemed to cling to the man, and the man, half in jest,
yet half in earnest, to cast her off. She laughed--an odd, rather wild,
laugh, with little mirth, it seemed. Herries turned about and stared
after the couple, for he knew the man. All Edinburgh knew that figure,
and a passer-by, a labouring man, accosted Herries with a laugh,--
'Ay, ye may glower,' he said, with a boastful air, 'ye may glower, and
your eyes be fu' o' pride--for that is Robert Burns!'
But if Herries stared after the retreating figure, it was certainly not
with pride. An expression of disgust curled his fine, severe lips into
lines more fastidious than ever.
'The dog!' he said, shortly and aloud, and turned on his heel.
*CHAPTER XI.*
When Herries re-entered his house, he did not go up to his own rooms at
once, but turned into his partner's office, which was on the ground
floor, to the front. It was a smaller apartment than his own, and its
aspect was even more strictly in keeping with the dry and severe nature
of the legal profession. Wire blinds shielded the rather grimy windows
from the street, and piles of dusty documents, tied with tape, covered
the bare tables with a kind of methodical litter. A scorching fire,
untidily smothered in its own ashes, heated the room to a stifling
closeness.
Creighton himself was a tall, lean man, long over fifty, gaunt as a
withered reed, with a face of a yellowish waxen pallor, which betokened
delicacy--a good deal of reddish whisker, fading into grey, and sparse
hair of the same colour. The rusty black of his dress was respectable;
a shrewd eye, a dry manner, constituted the rest of the outward man. Of
the inward, little, if anything, was known to anyone, even to his
partner. He was the son of a minister; a deadly quarrel with his family
in early life had separated him from every individual of his own blood.
So much was known. He made no friends, and cared for nothing in the
world but his business--so much seemed apparent. Between the man and
his younger, but superior, partner, there existed a certain, but
absolutely unspoken sympathy; there was a decided likeness in the
strength of their reserve and in the solitude of their lives. As a
matter of fact, though Herries, in his youthful hardness, never dreamed
of such a thing, the elder man cherished towards the younger, hidden as
though it were a crime, a sentiment of deep, and even soft affection.
Herries attracted, dominated, and possessed his partner; yet no one
knew, as Creighton did, his faults and weaknesses. And no one dreaded
for him, as Creighton did, with the experience of an embittered life
behind him--the effects of the cold solitude and dry absorption in
business in which the young man lived. He was for ever making
efforts--little, tentative timid efforts--to influence Herries to relax
the young severity of his aspect, and the rigid regularity of his
habits. It was sometimes rather an odd game that the two played between
them, out of business hours, and, in an initiated onlooker, would have
provoked a smile.
As Herries entered his partner's room on the present occasion, the
latter, rather like a school-boy caught in some illicit act, slipped a
book under some papers on his table. It was a little, coarsely-covered
brown book, seen, at that day, on the tables of all men, gentle and
simple, but perhaps not quite the most suitable reading for an elderly
lawyer. Herries took a seat, his accustomed one in interviews with his
partner.
'This room is over-hot, Creighton, surely,' he said, 'but comforting
enough after the streets.'
'My chest has been troublesome lately,' answered the elder man. 'These
north winds flay me alive. You have been out--it is good to be young!'
'Oh, ay!' said Herries, discontentedly. 'I have been out with my
cousin's children--plague take them! Did I tell you that the annuities
hitherto paid to Mrs. Maclehose by the Writers' and Surgeons' Benevolent
Societies are stopped? I had trouble enough getting them for her, five
years since, when Maclehose left her. Now that 'tis known he is making
an income in Jamaica, naturally such charitable support is withdrawn.'
'Ay, to be sure,' said Creighton, quietly.
'I am writing to that damned scoundrel Maclehose,' Herries went on, 'to
say I will not pay another penny for his wife and family. Yet there are
the school fees due for the boy Willy, and I must give the lie to my
words to-morrow.'
'Well, well,' said Creighton, 'the laddie must have his schooling, sure
enough.'
'I'll be cursed if I can see why I should pay for it, though!' said
Herries, angrily. Perhaps there were few things that exasperated him
more than his partner's attitude in regard to the affairs of Mrs.
Maclehose, as they concerned her cousin. Here was a man, Herries
reflected, who, of all men, should have resented the intolerable and
altogether unbusiness-like nature of an arrangement which made one man
responsible for the support of the wife and family of another, and that
other, one who was earning a substantial annual income in a foreign
country. Agnes Maclehose was, indeed, cousin-germain to Archibald
Herries--the daughter of his mother's sister--and his sole living
relative. On her quarrel with a worthless husband, he had considered
himself to play but a kinsman's and a lawyer's part in arranging for her
the details of a separation; and when, with two young children on her
hands, and friendless, she had come to Edinburgh, he had done his best
to ameliorate for her the hardness of her situation. He had taken in
hand her money matters: she had a small income derived from money left
her by her father, but it fell far short of the modest necessities of
even a little household in the Potterrow. Out of his own pocket,
Herries supplemented its deficiencies, and it was not the money he
grudged, but the violation of a principle that he resented. And here
was Creighton--a lawyer, a man of sense and of extraordinary
shrewdness--who, instead of sympathising with his resentment, would for
ever try to soothe it with ridiculous excuses.
'She is your own blood,' he would say of his partner's relative, 'you
cannot put her on the street.' Or, 'It is but a sup of porridge the
bairns will be wanting just now, not much, a flea's bite,' and so forth,
and Herries would fume in vain. The old lawyer's private opinion of
Mrs. Maclehose was none the less of an extremely unflattering character;
he believed her to be a daughter of the horse leech, who doubtless
preyed upon his friend after the manner of her kind, and the sound of
her voice in the passage sent shivers down his back, for he was a
woman-hater, or something very like it. But she was yet, in his mind,
the one tie that Herries had, binding him to the world of kinship, of
human interests and human affection. And so the man, whose own heart
had perished of atrophy within him, strove to keep life in the heart of
the other by the one means that naturally offered itself.
Herries, failing thus, as usual, to rouse his partner's sympathy on the
score of the Maclehose difficulty, rose to go, and by a chance movement
of some papers on Creighton's table, he disclosed to view the guilty
little brown book hidden under them. His finely-drawn eyebrows arched
themselves in a kind of contemptuous query. 'At it again?' he said,
'that jingle that the town rings with? Your poet's star is in the
descendent now, though, Creighton,' he added.
'Never, sir!' said Creighton, hardily. 'That star will never set! It
shines to all time,--like Shakespeare's, like Homer's, for the matter of
that. You'll not put me out of conceit of my poet, sir!'
'Deuce take him!' said Herries, half carelessly, half in earnest. 'My
ears are sick of his name. We are like to hear less of it this winter,
though, I think; the creature palls at last. How the women fawned upon
him last year. Pah!'
'Women will fawn on anything--a dog, a dwarf, a china monster,' said
Creighton; 'but neither their fawning nor their neglect will touch the
fame, the genius of Robert Burns!' He spoke with heat, and his dull eye
kindled.
Herries looked at him with a mild wonder.
'It passes me,' he said, 'this mad enthusiasm for a rhymer--of dirty
rhymes, too, for the most part. To me they reek of the midden and the
yard, and neither they nor their author are fit furniture for
drawing-rooms--that's my contention. But there, sir, good-night! I
leave you to your poet. By the way,' he added, 'this reminds me that I
saw Master Bard on my way home to-night, at his old tricks. But it is
not duchesses and fine ladies are his game now, but his own kind, it
would seem.'
'God send him back to the fields and the hills!' ejaculated Creighton,
with warmth. 'The town is no place for poor Rob, and I doubt they have
ruined the lad between them all! But I must be gone, too, sir. Dick
has been waiting on me this hour and more in the cold.'
Dick--well known to half the town as 'Creighton's Dick'--was a dog, a
gaunt and hairy Skye terrier, with appealing eyes, who owned Creighton
as master. Every morning he followed the lawyer to his office, returning
home by himself, and every evening he came for him, waiting on the
doorstep for Creighton to appear. He never failed, and the townspeople,
on his line of route, would time their doings by the punctual coming and
going of the lawyer's dog.
'Come, man!' Creighton would say, as he closed the sounding door behind
him, and the dog, though stiff and old, would spring at his knees. This
night was one of a penetrating coldness, and Creighton seemed to shrink
together as he met the blast. But he faced it, and man and dog took
their accustomed way down the windy granite street.
*CHAPTER XII.*
Alison's journey to Edinburgh with her new friend was certainly the most
exciting and novel experience which her quiet life had yet afforded. It
was hardly more than daylight when they got to Green Loaning, and
exchanged their country conveyance for the Edinburgh stage coach. There
were but few people travelling at this season, and they had the interior
of that vehicle all to themselves. Nancy soon had it littered with all
the paraphernalia which ever seemed a part of herself--the down
cushions, the scent bottles, the poetry books, the pencil and tablets
for recording any sudden outburst of the Muse--all the thousand little
odds and ends, so new and so marvellous to Alison, the country girl of
simple habits and few possessions. Nancy was in high glee, the mood, as
it were, of some general of a feeble army, who, by an adroit and timely
stratagem, has defeated and outwitted a foe infinitely stronger than
himself.
'Well, Ally,' she said cheerfully, for Alison was a little tearful, just
at first, 'is it not a comfort, child, that you've left home with the
blessing of one parent at least? As to the other, well, your mother is a
resourceful lady, I am sure, and will find a good use for Mr. Cheape
yet. She will get him for Kate or Maggie--'
'Oh, no, no!' cried Alison in horror. 'But, indeed, my mother will be
sorely vexed,' she added; 'and what my poor father will say to her, I
cannot think. And, Nancy, how shall I ever face her again myself?'
''Tis far too soon to think of that, love,' said Nancy, comfortably.
'Perhaps you need never face her at all, in the way you mean. What you
have to think of now, child, is all the pleasant new things you have
before you--the town, new friends, new faces. 'Tis but a hole and
corner of a home, I'm taking you to, Ally, but it has a cheery hearth,
and you'll not be dull, I think.'
'How could I, how could anyone, be dull with you?' cried Alison. And,
indeed, that seemed a very unlikely contingency, the least likely of
all.
The coach rumbled on, sometimes smoothly, when Nancy chattered without
ceasing, sometimes with din and noise, when she would fall into a
pensive mood. Once they had a long pause for a rest or change of horses,
and it was then that Nancy rummaged in her bag and drew out a little
case of miniatures.
'Ah, my little men!' she said softly. 'You haven't seen them, Ally.'
The case held pretty little pictures of Willy and Danny--Willy with his
rosy cheeks, and Danny with his mother's eyes, turned sad and sorrowful.
Alison looked at them with delighted interest; these were to be the
substitutes, for a while, for Jacky and her sisters.
'You have not seen the mother-half of me, Ally,' Nancy was saying
softly; 'and yet, do you know, I am nothing if I am not a good mother;
'tis my best point.'
'Yes,' said Alison, sympathetically, and yet with a faint feeling of
surprise. She had heard so much about so many things from her
fascinating new friend, but so very little about the children. However,
Alison reflected, people always speak least about that which lies
nearest their hearts.
'Yes,' Nancy went on, gazing at the miniatures the while, 'there are
friends of mine, Ally, who say to me they wonder I can love the children
of such a father. My answer is, I love them the more, owe them the more
devotion and duty, for having given them such a father!'
The sentiment seemed unexceptionable, and found instant echo in Alison's
loyal breast. She noticed there was a third miniature in the case, but
it was covered with a piece of silk. Nancy now removed this and
disclosed the portrait of a young man, extremely handsome, in a dark
style, but the reverse of pleasing.
''Tis he!' she said, holding the miniature out to Alison, and turning
her head away, with a sigh.
'Mr.--Mr. Maclehose?' whispered Alison, delicately.
'Ay,' said Nancy, 'my deserter, my betrayer, I may, indeed, call him!
For did he not betray my youth, ruin my happiness, destroy my life? And
yet, I'm made so, Ally, that I can't part from his image, but keep it
there, with the faces of his innocent children. He was the lover of my
youth--I can't forget it!' She propped the miniatures up on the seat in
front of her, and continued to gaze upon them, with many head-shakings,
and soft, moist eyes. But presently the coach went on, and her mood
changed utterly; she fell to discussing the contents of a little basket,
which the hospitality of The Mains had prepared for her over-night.
''Twas only meant for one, Ally,' she laughed. 'Little your good mother
thought that two would be at its demolishment! But there's enough and
to spare; the lady has a generous hand.'
They had quite a gay little meal. The neglected miniatures overturned
with the jolting of the coach. Mr. Maclehose's, indeed, fell down among
the straw at the bottom of the vehicle, and it was Alison who finally
picked him up, dusted him, and replaced him in the case. The short day
began to close in now; the tired travellers spent the rest of the
journey half asleep, and mostly in silence.
It was a clattering over cobble-stones--a din indescribable of wheels
and horses' hoofs--that woke Alison at last to a realisation of her
arrival in the town. The coach drew up at its office in the
Grassmarket, and they got out there. A man was waiting, with a 'hurley'
or barrow to take their boxes, while the two ladies themselves walked, a
link-boy flashing his torch before them. How high and dark seemed the
houses, how narrow the echoing streets! Alison, dazed and a little
frightened, kept close to her companion, who chattered gaily, with
undiminished and irrepressible vitality. They came to the Potterrow
eventually, and to the dark archway and stone stair which led to Nancy's
'garret,' as she called it. A very decent serving-woman was holding a
light at the stair-head, and presently two little boys had rushed out,
and half-smothered their mother with hugging arms and raining kisses.
'Oh! gently, boys, gently!' cried Nancy, laughing and kissing all at
once. Then she put an arm about Alison. 'Come, Ally,' she said, 'and
be welcome to my little nest!'
It was a little nest indeed. Allison thought it the tiniest, yet the
cosiest and homeliest room she had ever seen. Such a bright fire leapt
in the polished grate, such cosy red hangings were drawn across the
windows; the polished panelling of the walls gleamed so cheerfully, and
there was a table drawn to the hearth. Presently, they were sitting
there, over a dish of tea; but Nancy could get no peace to eat or drink
for the boys. They seemed both on her knee at once--Willy, with rough
boyish arms about her neck--Danny, with adoring eyes, never taken from
her face.
'You see, they love their little mother, Ally,' she said, and her eyes
were full of tears. Alison cast a motherly eye upon the children. It
was very late, she thought, in her matter-of-fact way, for little boys
to be out of their beds, especially the younger, who looked so small and
'shilpit.' Then she reflected she would ask Nancy, as soon as possible,
to be allowed to let out their clothes--more especially Willy's--for the
discrepancies of the little green suits were at once apparent to her
practical eye. Nancy, in the meantime, was frolicking about the little
room, putting things into place, giving a pat here, a push there--a
little tug to a curtain, or change of position to a screen or chair.
Presently, she fell upon a packet of letters that had awaited her
arrival, and was instantly absorbed in them, her quick, little, ringed
fingers busy with their fastenings. All at once she gave a little cry
of rapture and surprise.
'Ally,' she called, 'oh, Ally! what do you think? The gods are kind at
last--Fortune smiles! Did I not tell you I'd get my heart's desire?
Here is a letter from my cousin Nimmo--Miss Nimmo--and she asks me to a
tea-drinking at her house to-morrow; 'tis actually to meet--to meet and
be made known to, the Poet--my poet--the world's poet--the immortal
bard--ah! magic name--to Robert Burns!' Alison smiled down at her
friend with her kind, gentle grey eyes.
'I'm so glad, Nancy,' she said; ''twill be a great event--and how lucky
you are home in time!'
'La, yes, child, indeed!' said Nancy. 'Supposing I had missed it, I'd
have gone mad, I think, with sheer vexation! Ally, you've brought me
happiness, you've brought luck to my house!' She flung an arm about
Alison's waist; she was almost dancing with glee. Her great dark eyes
shone and glowed, her vivid lips were parted, to let her hurried
breathing come and go. Beside the quiet, calm, unstirred country girl--a
something tropical, she seemed, turning to passion, as the flower turns
to the light it cannot live without.
'But now, to bed!' she cried. 'To bed, boys, Alison, all. To-morrow
must come quick, quick--on wings, Ally, on wings!'
So the little rooms were darkened, and Alison, feeling rather big and
strange amid her new surroundings, took possession of Jean's closet,
feeling more at home when she found that Danny slept beside her, in a
little cot like Jacky's.
*CHAPTER XIII.*
A north wind, whistling at the windows, awoke Alison next morning from
rather troubled dreams of The Mains, and her mother, and Mr. Cheape.
But it is difficult not to be cheerful at twenty, and Alison, who was a
sensible and wholesome young woman, had soon put away night-thoughts,
and was prepared to enter heartily into all the brisk novelty of her
surroundings. Nancy's home, if a garret, was a very lively garret, with
the boys at their play, Jean's cheerful industries, and its own gay,
fascinating little mistress, tripping here and there, with laughter ever
on her lips and in her eyes.
'Why, Ally,' she cried, 'the sun shines on you, child! 'Tis the first
fine morning for a month. You must get a walk and see the town.' She
was busy with a dress, as she spoke, a gay thing of rose pink, just
sobered down with black, that she had taken out of a press.
'For, you see, love,' she said, 'I must be modish to-night, if ever so
in my life. Had there been time, I'd have had a new gown to deck poor
Nancy's fading charms, and fit them for a poet's eye.'
'You'd look pretty in anything,' said Alison, meaning every word. Nancy
laughed, with the liquid sparkle of her wonderful almond eyes.
'But, child, you shall not sit in here all day, watching me trim my
silly self for Nimmo's tea-drinking,' she said. 'I will tell you what
we'll do. Willy and Danny shall take you between them: I have not,
indeed, the time myself this morning, or I'd come with my Ally as the
first of pleasures; but you shall walk over to the New Town, and to my
cousin Herries's, and get me the packet of monies that is due. 'Tis
mighty awkward in him not to have it waiting me here. I've to borrow
from Jean already; but it makes a nice outing on a sunny morning. Will
you go, child?'
'Surely,' said Alison. And she went away to prepare herself, for her
first walk in the streets, in the little closet she could hardly turn
in. She tied on, as she was wont to do at home on Sundays, her wide hat
of rather sun-burnt straw, over the 'mob' that was supposed to keep her
hair in order. So that her sweet, grave face had a double framing of
clean frills and soft unruly curls. A cross-over tippet covered her
handsome shoulders. It was almost a summer suit, but Alison had nothing
else.
'Lud, what a country figure the poor child cuts,' was Nancy's inward
comment as Alison stood before her. 'I must see to her clothes
presently, presently.' She came to the stair-head to see the little
party set off, bidding the boys take great care of their friend.
A gay north wind blew high that day through the grim streets of
Edinburgh town. It was a morning of bright, shallow, winter sunshine.
When they had gone down into the Cowgate, and up again on the other
side, Alison and her little guides found themselves on the ridge of the
city, and below them they could see the nascent New Town spreading
itself, and beyond that, a lovely distance, rounded by the blue hills of
Fife, and watered by the widening Forth. It was a day and scene to lift
the spirits to their zenith. The keen wind searched the thin folds of
Alison's summer gown, and blew the curls about her face, which grew rosy
with the cold. Her blood ran warm, and she laughed, with the little
boys, just for pure health and happiness and freedom.