his presence. Think of it! And you will see him, Ally--ay--and hear
him. For don't suppose that I forgot my Ally in my raptures. I said to
him, "I have a song-bird, sir, up in my eyrie, whose wood-note wild will
delight you." You remember how I told you, Ally, he delights in a voice
to sing over to him the old country airs and catches, and this he told
me himself to-night. So you must be in song, sweetest--when he comes,
in a day or two--and we will tune the old harp, and have a heavenly
evening with the Muses.'
This, surely, was a prospect to delight any girl, and fill her brain
with dreams. But Alison, as she went to bed that night (prosaic girl--I
grieve to state it of a heroine), never thought of the honour in store
for her. In the first place, she was sleepy, and in the second--well, in
the second, her thoughts seemed inclined to stay elsewhere. There
flickered before her eyes--it would come--the most teasing, tantalising
little picture--the cameo-like outline of a profile, virile though
delicate--and oh, so dreadfully severe; the steely penetration of cold,
cold blue eyes; the lines of a figure that held Danny on its knee, and
had Willy leaning heavily against its shoulder. And the following, or
something like it, was Miss Graham's last waking thought that night.
'I've heard Nancy call him "little," but he's as big as me, and I' (with
a deep sigh) 'am so much, much too big for a woman.... If I were as wee
as Nancy, I'd call him ... tall.'
*CHAPTER XVI.*
The figure of Robert Burns at all the Edinburgh parties of the winters
of 1786-1787 is as classical among the classical portraits of literary
history as that of Byron at Ravenna, or Shelley at Geneva, or Scott
among the woods of Abbotsford. It is the imposing and yet pathetic
spectacle of a Titan in a chain of flowers. For here was a man, a
peasant pure and simple, taken from the plough, to be the pet for a
while of fine ladies in genteel drawing-rooms, and the plaything of men,
who, though they were pigmies beside him, yet covered him with an easy
condescension, and held him as the object of a gracious, if fitful,
patronage. Burns had borne the ordeal of his sudden popularity with
wonderful steadfastness of mind. The natural shrewdness of the Scottish
peasant was combined in him with the splenetic melancholy of the
poetical temperament; and the combination aided him to a singularly just
view of his position and its dangers. He was never over-sanguine; he
suspected that his course, like that of other meteors, would be brief,
if brilliant; and, so far as it lay within the bounds of Edinburgh
society, so it proved. That society--that brilliant little world of
fashion, intellect and power--has been held to account for its treatment
of the peasant-poet, whom it _feted_ for a season, and then dropped. It
had hailed him with acclamation because he was a peasant--the more
wonderful a genius for being so--and then, because he was a peasant, it
held him at arm's length. It was no more than he himself had foretold,
though in foretelling it he had hardly realised the embittering effects
upon his proud and sensitive temper. It was a great and cruel
injustice--the thoughtless inconsistency of a selfish world--but, under
the circumstances, it was inevitable and almost natural. It seems
certainly to have been the fact that, by the time his first season in
the capital was over, the attitude of two-thirds of its society towards
the poet was, like that of Herries, one of a growing repulsion.
It was at this juncture, at the beginning of his second season, that
Burns met Mrs. Maclehose in the drawing-room of Miss Nimmo. All the
little world gathered at that party had smiled at the result; but it was
a smile entirely devoid of malice. No one knew, or even thought, any
harm of the charming little grass-widow--victim of a heartless
desertion--who lived so simply and so blamelessly with her two young
children in her garret in the Potterrow, under the strict guardianship
of that most respected and rising young man, her cousin, Archibald
Herries. Her weakness for the Muses was well known, and her passion to
be made acquainted with the poet of the hour had long been a jest.
While, as to Burns, there was no question at all what his opinion would
be of a pretty and charming young woman of lively parts, who was ready
to fall down and worship him. So, when the two came together, and sat
the whole evening side by side upon a sofa, engaged in a conversation so
absorbing, that they had neither eyes nor ears for the rest of the
world--everyone nodded and laughed and let them alone.
Burns at this time had come to Edinburgh on business connected with the
publication of his works. He was lodged in a couple of rooms in St.
James's Square in the New Town, and kept, on the whole, but doubtful
company. Fine friends, as already hinted, were growing cold, and fine
ladies, in high places, fastidious. In the lesser intellectual
circles--as at Miss Nimmo's--he was still welcome. But it was not a
happy or prosperous period in his life. Money matters worried, and
conscience pricked. A summer's dalliance in his native place had
reduced his much-enduring Jean Armour to a condition which resulted in
that meek woman's ignominious expulsion, for a second time, from her
father's house. Other matters, also of a tender and delicate nature,
were giving trouble. From a poet's love affairs it is seldom discreet
to lift the veil. It can only be said that their frequency never seems
to negative their fervour, while they last. Burns had a capacious
heart, which could furnish shrines for several idols at one time; a
complex nature where, as ever, the Soul and the Satyr strove for unequal
mastery. It may be imagined how delightful to such a temperament was
the balm of Mrs. Maclehose's generous adulation. The poet was precisely
in that condition when a man desires to be soothed, to be flattered, to
be made to forget his own shortcomings and the world's cruelty. And who
so clever to keep him in such a mood as the fascinating little
grass-widow of the Potterrow? So their spirits rushed together, and
they swore an eternal friendship on the spot. In a couple of days, it
was arranged, the poet should come and take a dish of tea with Mrs.
Maclehose at her house, and that lady was in the seventh heaven. But,
to quote the bard himself,--
'The best laid plans o' mice and men
Gang aft a-gley'--
and the tea-drinking, at that early date, never took place. Either on
the way home from Miss Nimmo's, or on some errand the following day, the
poet was knocked down in the street by a coach, and thus, instead of
hastening to the Potterrow on the wings of an exalted friendship, he
found himself crippled and confined to his lodging in St. James's Square
with a broken knee-pan and a highly-irritated temper. In the Potterrow
the news of this untimely accident came as a crushing disappointment.
Nancy cried like a child, and Alison, who had not shed such tears
herself since she was seven years of age, strove to comfort her with
every device of words and every promise of future compensation that she
could think of.
'He'll come yet--of course he will, Nancy,' she said cheerfully; 'and
then, you know, he'll write.'
Alas! easy words! Had poor Alison but foreseen with what a fatal
facility he would, and did, write: with what awful and voluminous
avidity they both would fall upon pens, ink and paper, she would not
have spoken so lightly. Could she but have had a vision of that weary
sequence of thick letters, that only too often her own faithful though
unwilling hands would have to carry, she would not have been so
delighted when the first one was written and the first received. Nancy,
in a fever of thwarted eagerness, had at first threatened to rush off to
visit the bard in his confinement.
'I must see him!' she cried, stamping her little foot. 'I shall, and
will! What's to prevent me? Am I not a wife and mother? Are we not
all relatives--sons and daughters of Adam? Why should a censorious
world put difficulties in the way of my visiting my poor friend? I'll
not be bound by these ridiculous conventionalities!' But Alison's sound
natural sense averted the threatened indiscretion.
''Twould embarrass the poor man to receive you, Nancy,' she sensibly
said. 'You know you have told me yourself how low is his station in the
world, and 'tis little likely he has a room fit to see ladies in, and it
would hurt his pride that you should find that out. And then--and then,
your cousin, Mr. Herries, who does not favour--'
'Drat my cousin!' said Nancy, petulantly, 'and you to quote him, as
solemn as the owl himself! But 'tis true--God's truth, indeed--I
daren't offend him. And most consumedly it would offend his
highness--such a visit on my part--if it got to his ears. No, you are
right, Ally--wise, Ally! I see it. I'll abandon this visit, though
'twould but be one of kindness and mercy. I'll take me to my pen. Thank
Heaven for the pen, Ally, that permits no real separation--no severing
of souls--between friend and friend!'
The Pen! Little, busy, inky devil, that, when the tongue would stammer
and the lips be stiff, blabs out the inmost secrets of the heart!
Betrayer and tell-tale, with a treachery that is worse than tongues,
because indelible! Specious ally, who turns king's evidence, and
becomes the most relentless witness to our follies! Pin's point, now
steeped in honey and now dipped in gall, oh, power of hurt, far deadlier
than the honest sword, this pricking Pen! Sensible Alison, when, long,
long years after this, she came to hold in her hand certain letters,
yellowed and faded with age, and to read, marvelling greatly, their
turbulent, passionate pages, thought this, and more, of the dangerous
doings of the quill; although, to be sure, she never expressed herself
in the language of hyperbole. That was not her way.
When, however, the first two or three of these letters were written, and
their answers received, in those gay early days in the Potterrow, Alison
was delighted, because they made her friend so happy.
'We are to make it a regular thing,' Nancy explained, 'and who knows,
Ally, but that it may become one of the classic correspondences in our
language? We are to have borrowed names chosen by him. How I love this
fancy of Arcadian names in such a commerce; it gives the last delightful
touch of romance. He is to be "Sylvander," and I "Clarinda." Now is not
"Clarinda" a pretty name, Ally? Heard you ever a sweeter or a more
musical?'
''Tis very pretty, indeed,' said Alison, good-naturedly. Secretly she
thought it an outlandish appellation. 'I think "Nancy's" quite as
pretty,' she added, truthfully; 'though, to be sure, a stranger could
not call you so at once.'
'Why, that's just it!' cried Nancy. 'Don't you see how we avoid vulgar
familiarity on one hand, and chilling formality on the other? 'Tis the
most perfect idea. I am in love with it, Ally!'
Alison smiled benignly on her little friend, quite unaware that the
cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, had appeared on their horizon, the
cloud that would some day cover the sky.
*CHAPTER XVII.*
One day, about this time, our heroine received a great surprise, not to
say a violent shock, in a letter from her father. She came running in
with it to Nancy, who had not risen, with a very white face.
'Lud, child!' cried her friend, looking up from the composition of a
morning poem, 'what is it?'
'My sister Kate is to have Mr. Cheape!' gasped Alison. Nancy burst out
laughing.
'Well, love,' she said, 'what did I tell you? And why pull such a long
lugubrious face over it? Could any arrangement more altogether natural
be imagined? There is another of you disposed of, your mother pleased,
and Mr. Cheape fitted with a wife at last.'
'Oh, how could she do it?' wailed Alison, alluding to her
less-fastidious sister. 'Kate, too, the bonniest of us all!'
'Well, dear, she gets the wedding silk and a man with it,' said Nancy.
'I'll be bound she is quite content.'
But Alison, not so easily consoled, wept over the horrid fate of her
sister. Her father, otherwise, wrote cheerfully. The impending wedding
had restored good humour to his consort, and he expressed a belief that
Alison, if she had a mind to, might now return home, and all would be
forgotten and forgiven. The laird, however, proceeded to counsel his
daughter to remain where she was for the present, and 'get all the good
she could for her coach-hire to the town,' as he expressed it, after the
matter-of-fact manner of The Mains.
'Sure, Ally, you'd never think of leaving me?' said Nancy in sincere
alarm, and with imploring eyes.
'Indeed, I've no wish to,' said Alison.
'For, you know,' went on the little woman, clinging to Alison's hand,
which she fondled as she spoke, 'I get to lean on you, Ally, day by day,
and more and more. You're so big, and strong, and steady, not a poor
little straw like me, blown about by every wind.'
Alison looked a little doubtful. 'I'm big and strong, I know,' she said
pensively, 'but I doubt 'tis more in the body than in the mind, Nancy.
I'm like a child in leading-strings, I sometimes think. 'Twas our
mother kept us all so, I suppose, being herself strong-willed.'
'Well, to be sure,' said Nancy, with a laugh, 'you'd have married Mr.
Cheape if it hadn't been for me.
'Yes, I believe I should,' said Alison, slowly. 'It seemed best for
everybody. I'd never have had the power alone, to break with it. So,
you see, I doubt my own strength, Nancy, when I'm put to it.'
Possibly Alison's straight mind was already puzzling itself over the
problem of that Platonic correspondence which had now become such a part
of life in the Potterrow--bringing a feverish element into it. Letters
came and letters went every day. Sometimes they were entrusted to the
'caddies,' or town's messengers, but these proved a disagreeable class
to deal with. Scenting an intrigue, they were extortionate, and Nancy's
slender purse could endure no such constant drain. So it came about
that Alison, only too naturally and too often, became friendship's
messenger, and very heartily did she grow to dislike the walk between
the Potterrow and the poet's lodging. St. James's Square, now little
better than a 'slum,' was even in those days an unattractive locality.
Unlike the rest of the New Town, it was meanly built, and had a squalid
air, its denizens being not among the most respectable or desirable of
the city. Disagreeable and meaning glances would be cast at the tall
young lady, still very countrified in her air and dress, who hurried
along, either alone, or only with a little boy for company. Then, at
the dingy house where the poet lodged, the door would be opened either
by a rough-looking man, with a very insolent and disagreeable manner (it
was, indeed, none other than the poet's precious friend and crony,
Nicol), or by a slatternly woman, with a sly glance, greedy for a bribe.
The bribe, alas! at Nancy's instigation, was given by Alison's innocent
and shrinking hand. How could she help it? This element of secrecy--of
the underhand--in the affair vexed her to the soul. She did not doubt
that the correspondence in itself was perfectly innocent. Nancy gave
her to understand it was the most high-souled, the most improving, the
most inspiring correspondence that ever was carried on. It treated
almost exclusively of religion and the Muses, and it was to be the means
of bringing the poet to better ways of thinking--especially on the
former important subject. Yet, Nancy said, this was a censorious world;
it would at once wickedly misunderstand a correspondence between a
married woman, in her delicate position, and a man of the poet's
character and condition. Therefore, it must be kept quiet--most
especially from Herries, with his distorted views and unjust judgments,
must it be kept a secret. Alison sighed, but she loved and trusted her
little friend, and acquiesced.
Nor, at this time, must it be supposed that Alison's life was all a
running of messages, or even a willing drudgery for Nancy's little boys,
which she herself would gladly have made it. Far too kind-hearted was
the little mistress of the Potterrow to permit of this. She desired
above all things that her young friend should be seen and admired, and
one fine morning she had suddenly said,--
'And now, Ally, we must see to your clothes, love! Look, the sun shines!
We'll e'en away to Madam Cantrip's this very minute, and see the
fashions.'
'But,' cried Alison, aghast, 'I've no money to buy new clothes, Nancy!'
Nancy simply pinched her cheek and laughed, ever so sunnily and gaily.
'The world may call me poor,' she said, 'but I'm not too poor to have
the luxury of giving to those I love--once and away. And, child, if you
say one word about it--make one objection--I'll pack you off back to The
Mains, and never love you more.'
So Alison submitted, and it was not with a bad grace. The discrepancies
of her _toilette_--entirely conceived, cut and furnished forth at The
Mains--troubled her greatly. Remember that she was only twenty, and had
never had a fine gown in her life.
'A pelisse for the cold streets, dear, and hood to match,' said Nancy,
cheerfully, 'and a muslin--yes, I think, a muslin for the evening--the
East India muslin is so much in vogue.'
This was as they walked down to the mantle maker's, and that diligent
personage, as she eyed the proportions of her new customer, was quite of
opinion that a pelisse was the very thing to do them justice.
'The elegant and the fragile for you, Mistress Maclehose,' she astutely
remarked, 'the handsome for miss!'
And very handsome indeed that pelisse proved when it came home, being of
cloth of a cosy crimson, silk-lined and fur-bordered, with a most
coquettish hood, that would just show a curl or two, and was indeed
mighty becoming to its wearer. To Alison it seemed a garment fit for a
princess; she could not get over its wonders and beauties, and hardly
knew herself when she put it on. And, in truth, it worked a wondrous
transformation in her air.
'Well, I declare!' Nancy exclaimed, eyeing her over when she tried it
on, 'you are quite the fine lady, child, and I feel put away in the
shade!'
The white muslin robe was also a triumph--cunningly embroidered, and
showing more of Alison's fine white throat and shoulders than had ever
been seen before. Nancy's taste finished it with a blue silken scarf,
and a blue snood for the curls.
'There,' she cried, 'you'd charm the eyes of Archie himself, if he had
any, but he's blind, dear; we must seek you some gallanter beau.'
Having thus enhanced the charms of her _protegee_ with fine clothes,
Nancy was not content, but turned a careful eye on her accomplishments.
'You must have lessons on the harp, Ally,' said she, 'and for the voice,
love. Such talent as yours must not be neglected. And then you will be
the more able to charm our poet when he comes--our poet, who shall be
nameless!'
Therefore, one Schetki, a teacher of music, was summoned to instruct
Miss Graham for two hours in the week in the management of the voice and
harp. So that the little room in the Potterrow echoed to sweet sounds,
the twanging of long-silent strings, the deep, sweet notes of Alison's
voice; while Nancy, bent with flushed cheeks over her little desk,
scribbled her interminable letters--letters, alas! losing more and more
of their discreet Platonic tone. The while, two little round-eyed boys
would stop their play and listen to the singing; and busy Jean would
pause at the door to catch the floating tune.
So passed away two or three busy and happy weeks. I daresay it would be
about the Christmas time, when such things are common, that a batch of
bills was delivered at the door of a certain rising young lawyer in the
New Town. Among them were two--one from a certain mantle-maker of first
celebrity, and one from a much respected teacher of the musical arts.
They contained, severally, these interesting items:--
_To a Pelisse, in Crimson Paduasoy, lined_
_silk, bordered fur, . . . . . . . 5 guineas._
_To a Robe, Indian Muslin, embroidered,_
_3 guineas and 15 shillings._
And further:--
_To Lessons in the Harp and Voice given at_
_Mistress Maclehose's in the Poterrow, . 2 guineas._
But as to how these interesting and expensive disclosures were received
by their victim, it would not be discreet in me, at this point in my
story, to tell.
*CHAPTER XVIII.*
It would be in the course of these December weeks that Creighton,
Herries's associate in business, formed a habit of coming, oftener than
usual, to his partner's room, for a chat before leaving the office.
Herries had no objection, but he rather wondered what brought the man.
There was to be noticed, certainly, at this time, an increasing
feebleness in Creighton's health. He coughed frequently, and his
breathing seemed to trouble him. Herries thought that perhaps he
enjoyed the additional comforts of his superior's room; he would walk
about in it rubbing his hands, talking, rather aimlessly, about trifles.
Once he rather astonished Herries by an enquiry after the health of Mrs.
Maclehose--that lady being no favourite of his.
'Your relative and her children are well, I trust?' he said, in his
formal way. 'Ahem'--with a laboriously unconscious air; 'I daresay you
will be seeing, now and then, the young gentlewoman who at present seems
to form one of Mrs. Maclehose's circle?'
'Miss Graham? I'll be sworn I do!' said Herries, laughing. 'He would
have bad eyesight who failed to see anything quite so big and strapping,
up in my cousin's garret there, for all the world like a gowk in a
hedge-sparrow's nest.'
'She seemed a pleasing and unassuming young woman,' said the elder man,
mildly. 'She inadvertently paid me a visit in my office some time
since. I have been looking up the old books, and find that the young
lady's grandfather was a client of the old house, when the century was
in its teens. It would be a genteel recognition of the old connection
to show her some little civility on this her first visit to the
capital.'
'What could you do for a girl like that?' inquired Herries, carelessly.
'Well,' said Creighton, with a nervous air, 'I did think--I was thinking
that a tea-drinking--'
'A _what_?' said Herries, looking at his partner as if he thought him
gone mad.
'Well, an asking of the ladies to tea one day,' said Creighton, with a
look of guilt. 'But I daresay 'tis impossible--impossible,' he went on,
as the look of incredulity refused to fade upon the younger man's face.
'Something else might be thought of--showing the town to the young lady,
there's much in this old city instructive to a young mind. And 'tis a
pity the poor thing should go back, to be buried in the country, without
seeing all she can; but I'm helpless there; these streets kill me just
now.' But Herries seemed to smile upon this latter suggestion as a
suitable one.
'Show the lions of the city to Miss Graham?' he said. 'Well, we might
see about that. 'Twould be an act of good-nature to the country-mouse.
I'll oblige you if I can find the time.'
One of the genuinely kind impulses to which Herries, in spite of his
apparent coldness, was often subject, whimsically seized him on this
matter. He had now seen Miss Graham several times. She was his
cousin's guest; after all, perhaps he owed her a civility. So, one
morning, when no business of importance was demanding personal
attention, he set off for the Potterrow, with a view to suggesting a day
of sight-seeing to his cousin and her friend.
Both ladies were fortunately at home, and professed themselves delighted
with the idea.
'The driest thing imaginable, love, and just like him to propose it,'
said Nancy, in a vivacious whisper, as the two went off to prepare
themselves for a walk. 'But 'tis proper you should see all the tiresome
things, and, of course, I must come as duenna, though, Lord knows, you'd
be as safe with Archie in a desert as with your grannie. Not but what
it is kind of him to propose this,' added the little woman, with
compunction,--'kind in substantiate, but no romance: that's his
character.'
Alison was taking her new pelisse out of its cherished folds, and
brushing her curls into extra good order. Nancy playfully pushed her
away from the one mirror of the establishment.