over the poet's face. The heavy sensuality of its lines seemed to melt
away, and leave in its place a sort of splendid, weighty thoughtfulness.
Leaning his elbow on his knee, his chin upon his clenched hand, the
whole soul of the man seemed once more concentrated in his eyes, but
they were no longer the eyes of the satyr, but of the poet; and they
were looking at Alison, not as at the woman, but as at the singer, whose
sweet singing roused inspiration at its source. Even now his lips
moved, for the lyrical impulse stirred within him, and the thronging
words and the tingling lines leapt into unison in his throbbing brain.
You could see the massive features quiver, the passionate veins upon the
temples swell, the eye blaze beneath the furrowed brow. Nancy watched
and worshipped him as a fanatic before a shrine, and even literal
Alison, as she felt herself wrapt in that consuming presence, knew
herself, with a singular uplifting of the spirit, to be, for the moment,
the privileged hand-maid of genius. When the last sounds died away, the
man would move, would slap his giant thigh, with something like a shout
of pure delight, and call for more, broad as the peasant that he was,
and with the passion and insistence of a boy. In these fine, natural
moments, Alison liked him well, and when he fell to discussing the
ballad or the air--thoughtful, intelligent, shrewd--she would like him
even better, and feel that even Herries might approve her liking. Ah!
had this been all, and these little _symposia_ that were to take place
so often in the cosy little room, been all as innocent as they seemed,
what a fitting, what a grand impression of Scotland's poet would Alison
have carried away with her! But, alas! 'Sylvander' all too soon would
don the cap and bells, and then Alison would wonder, with a shudder, how
Nancy could bear to have him sit so close, and bend so near to hers that
changed face, with the bold eyes and sensual lips. Intellectual
attraction--fascination even--the man had for the girl, must have had,
indeed, for all who came under the sway of his tremendous personality
and his genius, but it warred in her, sometimes, with a physical
repulsion, so strong that she could scarcely conceal it.
This first evening, Willy called to her from his bed, for the story she
was in the habit of telling him before he went to sleep. So 'Sylvander'
and 'Clarinda' snatched a few precious moments of communion alone.
'Well,' Nancy said, 'was not that a fit song for a poet's ear? Has not
the child the sweetest voice?'
'Ay,' said the poet, stretching great arms above his head, his dark eyes
glowing, and his bronzed cheek flushed. 'Ay, a sweet voice! My heart
leaps, and my blood sallies at its sweetness. I am a slave to such
sounds. But miss will not sing often for the poor bard. I can see,' he
added in a different tone, ''tis a fine lady--not a congenial, not a
sympathetic soul....'
'What? Poor Ally?' said Nancy, in unfeigned surprise. 'Why, 'tis the
simplest, the most unquestioning child! Sure, there's no thought of
criticism in her heart towards anyone.' The poet shrugged his shoulders
incredulously. He had the quick, morbid sensitiveness of the poet
tribe, and already he had noted the almost intangible shrinking of
Alison from his person--the hardly perceptible drawing of herself up
when he pressed too near, or spoke gallantly. He put it down to the
feeling of class, which he was always so suspiciously ready to detect
and to resent--the shrinking of a proud miss from the peasant.
'You see, Sylvander,' Nancy went on, 'the child may be of such great
service in our friendship. Her very presence is a pretext for the
visits of a certain bard. Young, fair, a songstress, might not
she--rather than poor Clarinda's fading charms--be thought to constitute
his attraction?'
'Provided the deception hurts no one,' said the Bard rather uneasily.
He had that sense of fairness which is too exclusively, it is to be
feared, a masculine quality. An untethered rover in the fields of love,
he never yet willingly poached, or spoiled another's sport. 'I would
not hurt miss with the world,' he added.
'Take care you do not the rather hurt Clarinda with the world!' cried
Nancy, shaking an admonitory finger. Passion and prudence alternately
swayed the little woman at this time; her warm temperament and growing
passion drove her within the sphere of danger; her love of the world and
its countenance, a terror of losing caste, as a young and pretty woman
in a delicate situation, held her back.
Now, as the poet rose to depart, she loaded him with cautions as to his
future coming and going. She begged of him not to employ the town's
messengers: they were so shifty, and getting to know her house too well;
not to come, if he could avoid it, in a chair--chairs were so unusual in
that poor part of the town that they caused remark; not to trouble Jean
too often at the door: 'twere better he should have the key.
'See how I honour, how I trust, my Sylvander!' she said, softly. The
poet pocketed the key, with, it must be admitted, a rollicking eye for
so romantic a personage. He did his best, however, to look only
impassioned, and not also entertained. And such apt deceivers are men,
that he perfectly succeeded.
When he was gone, Alison and Nancy sat a while together by the fire, but
they had singularly little to say to each other. Nancy asked a few
evidently forced questions about her boy, and the expedition to
Prestonpans; but her thoughts were elsewhere, and she was silent and
restless.
'Thank Heaven!' she exclaimed suddenly, 'now Danny's away, Herries will
not be poking his solemn face in so often as of late. 'Twould be most
consumedly awkward if he did.'
And then Alison realised, with a very strange feeling of aloofness from
her friend, and a peculiar sense of the unnaturalness of the situation,
that she could never--no, not imaginably ever, she thought--speak to
Nancy of her love, and of her lover, Herries!
So that wondrous day ended for Alison, and she was alone at last, with
no tangible memento of it, saving, indeed, a large cold potato in her
muff. A certain intangible memento, it is true, burned upon her cheek,
so that she was glad to bury it in the cool sheets. One never knows how
long it may be since a reader was in love, and so it were better,
perhaps, not to tell how a silly girl, that night, went to bed with a
cold potato under her pillow. It might be so very long ago--that silly
season with the reader--that he may well have forgotten that, though the
sense of humour is a mighty great thing, there is a time with us all
when it is nought.
*CHAPTER XXVII.*
Ordinary mortals, from the schoolboy upward, are familiar with the
disagreeableness of what may be called the Monday mornings of
life--those after-holiday mornings which come as a cold _douche_ after a
pleasant outing. Herries tasted the full amenities of this experience
on first buckling to his work after the excursion to Prestonpans. On
Sunday--a _dies non_ in the Edinburgh of those days, when most decent
persons went to church and stayed there--nothing could be done. On
Monday morning he descended to his office in his grimmest business mood,
very unlike a young man who had kissed a girl under the lantern in the
General's Entry, late on Saturday evening. Indeed, anyone less like
kissing, or being kissed, never was seen.
He found a disagreeable accumulation of business; and a certain fact
that had lately, from time to time, been hinting its existence--the
fact, namely, that his partner's working capacities were on the
wane--was this morning, for the first time, fully borne in upon his
mind. In regard to the rather important affairs of a client, there was
confusion, and, in respect to the preparation of certain deeds and
papers, delay; neither, a few weeks ago, would have been possible, under
Creighton's inexorable _regime_. Herries felt that probably he must
shortly face--of all things the most worrying to a business-man, whose
affairs have long run in a smooth, appointed groove--a change of
partnership. It was the more difficult as Creighton gave no hint of his
retirement, and the idea that such a hint might have to originate with
his partner, was exceedingly repugnant to the younger man. Herries was
aware that his associate's health was very delicate, but like all those
in daily contact with a failing man, he had no idea how great and how
rapid was the decline. It certainly never struck him that Creighton
omitted to speak of his retirement from business, simply because he
believed the last retirement of all to be imminent, and death about to
set his partner free.
When Herries had made some headway with his morning's work, lost his
temper with his clerk, and otherwise expressed his consciousness of the
untowardness of things in general, he made the pleasing discovery, that
a moral earthquake was heaving in the domestic department of his house.
His room was ill-swept, his fire ill-tended; he summoned Lizzie, who
appeared in even more than her usual condition of dishevelment, and
telling her to send Mysie with some wood, was met with the baffling
information: 'There's nae Mysie here!' delivered with a war-like snort.
'No Mysie!' exclaimed Herries. 'Why, what's come to the girl?'
'There's that come to her,' said Lizzie, succinctly, 'that it ill
becomes a decent body to hae the tellin' o'....'
'What!' said Herries, repressing a strong inclination to laugh. 'Has
the poor wench gone wrong?'
The ferocity of Lizzie's expression was answer enough.
'So homely looks are no safeguard after all, Lizzie?' said Herries, when
he had been enlightened. 'And all your trouble in choosing a discreet
helpmate was thrown away!' He could not help tormenting his dependent,
whose temper afforded him amusement at times, as well as inconvenience.
'How and when did you get rid of the girl?' he enquired.
'Rid o' her--the dirty besom!' said Lizzie, reverting to the idiom of
the fray. 'I put her to the door, and to the street--and her skirling
like a scraggit hen! I'se warrant ye, I got rid o' her!'
'Well, I hope you gave her her wages up to date,' said Herries, turning
away, 'and did not put the poor wretch penniless on the pavement, in her
condition, and in this weather.'
'Oo, she had siller, I'm thinking,' said the old woman, with a sly look;
'there was a croon i' the pocket o' her--and ane no' honestly come by,
neither.'
'Bless me!' said Herries, 'you paint your relative very black, Lizzie!
Did she steal the crown?'
'Na,' said Lizzie, with unpleasant meaning in her tone; she had a tongue
that would always hurt someone, if it could,--'she got given the croon
right enough! 'Twas frae that braw leddy i' the red coat ye had to her
tea here; she wad hae Mysie haud her tongue aboot some cantrip o' her
ane, up the toon there, leaving a letter, or sic-like trash; but Mysie,
ye ken, was simple, and aye blabbed everything she saw. O, they're a'
the same, gentle and simple,' added Lizzie, who hated her own sex with
inexplicable malice.
'You may go,' said Herries, curtly. He felt as though he had got a slap
across the face--and from a dirty hand.
Pressure of work at first allowed him no time for unprofitable musing.
He had to go down to his partner's room on business. The office, as
usual, was heated to suffocation, and he found Creighton--a most
singular state of things--half asleep, or rather in a condition of a
sort of semi-torpor, crouching over the fire. He, however, roused
himself, and attended to the business in hand with almost his usual
perspicacity. But Herries perceived that his energy was but a spurt; it
flagged almost instantly.
'You don't look well, sir,' he said to the elder man.
'I am not well, Herries,' Creighton answered heavily, but he said no
more, for his breath seemed to catch.
'I must beg of you to excuse my further attendance to-day,' he gasped
out. 'I must--I must go out into the air. I burn--my chest seems
weighted. The fresh air would relieve me.'
'It is very cold, sir,' said Herries, alarmed by his partner's symptoms.
'Let me come with you.'
'Will you?' said Creighton, wistfully. Herries helped the old man--he
seemed suddenly to have become a very old man--into his great-coat. He
hardly believed him fit to walk, but the going out seemed to relieve
him, as he expected. He drew one or two deep breaths of the icy air,
and then walked on, though with a feeble step.
'Take my arm,' said Herries, kindly. 'We'll have a turn in the sun,
below the castle.'
They proceeded for some way in silence. One subject tormented Herries's
thoughts; he was impelled--unlike himself, somehow--to give it
utterance.
'I was right, and you wrong, about a trifle, the other night,
Creighton,' he said. 'A young lady of our acquaintance, who refused my
escort up the town, did so because she had something to hide.'
'Who told you?' asked Creighton, sharply.
'Lizzie,' said Herries. 'The lass Mysie told tales when she got home.
She was heavily fee'd to hold her tongue about some letter secretly
left.'
'And you tell me,' exclaimed Creighton, with unexpected energy, 'that
you listen to the gossip of servants on such a subject! Fie, for shame,
sir! Besides, are you the Grand Turk, or a Catholic Inquisitor, that a
girl may not leave a letter on a friend? Just as likely it was not her
own letter, but your cousin's; and as to the feeing, why, 'twas the New
Year time, and she would have to fee the lass for her trouble.'
'A crown is a heavy fee from a girl's slender purse to a scullion,' said
Herries, moodily. 'I have an inkling,' he went on, frowning, 'where the
letter was left--St. James's Square, I dare be sworn! We know who
lodges there, and the women can no more keep off him than flies from
honey.'
'Bless me!' said Creighton. 'Are you blaming our poor Rob? Nay, sir,
but what a strange, far-fetched idea. I had hardly realised the Bard
was known to your cousin, though I think you told me they met some weeks
ago.'
'By this time, I daresay, he frequents my cousin's house,' said Herries,
quietly, 'for that's his way in such matters. A scoundrel in manners,'
went on the young lawyer, angrily; 'the seducer of women--I know him!
I'd sooner trust the lamb with the wolf, than a young, inexperienced
girl with such a man. The glamour of his genius hides the corruption of
his mind. The thought of that danger is sickening.'
'Wheesht, wheest!' said Creighton. 'I don't gainsay that he is
warm--too warm, poor Rob! But believe me, sir, 'tis not the young and
noble and innocent--like our fair friend who shall be nameless--that
such a man seeks. 'Tis the more experienced women--ripe for
dalliance--versed in such ardours--'
'Oh, you think of my cousin,' said Herries, coolly. 'But she dare not
try these tricks; she understands too well the delicacy and instability
of her present situation, she knows to a hair's-breadth what she can,
and what she cannot, risk. I can trust Nancy with herself, but
with--with a charge I cannot trust her. She's no fit guide for a young
girl.'
'Oh, be at rest, sir, be at rest!' said Creighton, smiling. 'She that
we talk of needs no guidance from your cousin. If there is guiding to
be done, her own will be the hand that guides; and whomsoever she guides
she will guide to a blessing. Take my word for that; I have looked her
through and through.... And now that we talk of angels, we begin to hear
their wings, I perceive.'
Herries looked up, and saw in the distance Alison and the child Willy
coming towards them.
'They--they sometimes walk here of a morning,' he said.
'Ah, you knew that!' cried Creighton, well pleased.
'It may be that I did,' said Herries.
His partner's words had poured balm upon his irritation. There was a
calmness and a strength about Creighton's common sense, that made it
very convincing. He could certainly influence Herries to a degree that
was possible with no one else. And now Alison herself was coming, and
the young man felt a sudden and uncontrollable tumult in his blood. She
passed them at the full distance of the broad walk, and only bowed, but
it was near enough for them to see the sudden colour in her half-averted
face, to note the quickened step and fluttered air. Creighton slipped
his arm from that of his friend.
'Run, man, run!' he said; 'you are due elsewhere. Don't you see the
signals held out for your welcome?'
'I--I see them,' stammered Herries, himself red as a boy. 'But you,
sir? Can you get home?'
'What matters an old man like me?' cried Creighton, impatiently. 'My
race is run. Be off--be off! She'll give you the slip yet; she's nearly
out of sight.'
Herries hesitated a moment; his cold eyes were alight as they looked
after the vanishing figure in the red pelisse.
'I'll take your advice, sir,' he said. And then he followed.
Creighton toiled up the steep ascent to his lodgings alone.
'All's well--for this time!' he was saying to himself. 'But how will it
be when I am not at his elbow to allay suspicion, to soothe pride?
They're ingrained in the nature of the lad. Will they lose him his
happiness as they did me mine? It's likely--it's likely yet, if I know
men.' He had barely breath to get up the long stone stair to his rooms,
and cast himself into a chair beside the neglected hearth. He looked
round the room with dull apathy of sickness, and wiped the sheer sweat
from his forehead with a shaking hand.
'She--she shall have all I have to leave in this world,' he muttered.
'For the lad's sake, and for the sake of one of her sex--dead this
thirty years. And for her own sake, too--a fine, a fair creature, a
bonny lass!' He made as though he would reach a desk that stood near
upon a table, but fell back weakly in his chair.
'Time enough yet for that, I daresay,' he said, closing his eyes.
There is often 'time enough' for the making of those wills, and yet the
future finds them--unmade.
*CHAPTER XXVIII.*
Down in the fields, near where, nowadays, Ainslie and Moray Places rear
their respectable family mansions--fields white that morning with the
thick, wintry rime--Archibald Herries and Alison Graham walked side by
side. He was bareheaded in the cold, for assuredly a man does not talk
easily of love with his hat on his head. He held it in a hand behind
him; the other arm had Alison's hand between it and his heart. This
girl was his. Had he needed to ask? There are some things craved and
received without question and answer. Suspicion and mistrust seemed to
have vanished away; no man could harbour either while he looked in
Alison's eyes.
'Whom shall we tell first, Ally?' he was asking.
'Need we tell anyone, sir--just yet?' said Alison, wistfully. 'Isn't it
too new and too--too good to be told?'
The words were too strictly an echo from his own nature for him to find
fault with them.
'But my cousin might have to be told,' he suggested.
'Nancy? Oh, no, no!' said Alison, impulsively.
'Why?' said Herries, laughing. 'I thought you were such dear friends,
and had no secrets from each other?'
'So we are--dear friends, sir,' said Alison, though not quite with the
enthusiasm she might have felt a month ago. 'But--I could not tell her
of this. 'Tis different to everything else in the world.'
'That's true,' Herries answered. 'Ally,' he said, suddenly, 'are you
prepared to find me but a poor lover? For 'tis that I'm likely to
prove, I fear. I am but a dry stick. Pretty speeches come so shyly to
my lips, and as to love-letters, I never put pen to paper but in the way
of business. Weeks might pass and I might never say, "I love you."'
'Sure,' said Alison slowly, as though she were thinking out some
abstruse and difficult problem, 'sure, 'tis the people that love each
other most that never do say "I love you." All my life long I've loved
my father and my sisters and little Jacky when he came, but I never
thought to say "I love you" to one of them. If you know a thing in your
heart, the less need to have it on your lips. Don't you think so, sir?'
'True, very true, Ally,' said Herries, thinking to himself what a pearl
of sweet sense he had found, and how she suited him; 'only--only--'
'Only what?' asked Alison, innocently.
'Only I would it were the General's Entry, dear,' whispered Herries, at
her ear, 'with walls and nothing but a dim old lamp....'
'Ah, but it's not, sir!' cried Alison, pulling away from him, scarlet
with blushes; ''tis the open field, and there comes Willy!'
'Plague take the child--so he does!' said Herries.
He had given the boy a shilling to spend at a booth in the suburb, and
it seemed to him hardly a shilling's-worth of absence that had been
granted. Willy came racing towards them, vociferous, flying a
newly-purchased kite above his head.
'So we must go, I suppose, sir?' said Alison, wistfully.
''Tis getting mighty cold, though we haven't noticed it,' Herries
observed, as they walked townwards across the fields. 'I think I smell
the snow.'
A thin, yellowish film had gathered over the bright sun, which, day
after day, had made the long, strong frost endurable. The cold, indeed,
became perceptibly greater, and a slight, shivering wind set in from the
north.
'Haste you home, child,' said Herries, 'and be in before the storm. You
may guess whether I come soon to the Potterrow or not.'
'N--not too often, sir,' whispered Alison. The whisper might have stood
for the mere coyness of a girl, and so Herries translated it. But in
Alison's mind was the troubled knowledge of how little welcome her lover
was just now, in the little room which his own liberality helped to make
so cosy and so home-like. It was very hard, she thought, but time would
doubtless show a way out of the difficulty, if one were only patient.
Alison, indeed, was very grave as she walked home that day, after
parting from her lover. She was very happy. Her feeling for Herries
had become--as such feelings will with such natures--a part and parcel
of herself--the very heart of her. It was a wondrous thing, a miracle,
that the one man she had ever known should also be the one man in the
world most worthy of love and honour. But then, to reverent and simple
minds, the miracle brings awe as well as joy, and Alison was a little
afraid of her own happiness, as though it could hardly be meant for such
as she. Not for nothing was she the daughter of those bucolic,
hard-lived ancestors of hers, who, generation after generation, in the
dull obscurity of The Mains, had dragged through joyless and prosaic
lives, ignorant of the world beyond the boundaries of their home.
Something of a want of buoyancy was Alison's, and it came from that old
home source. But she loved,--and the tingle of the new sensation ran
through her veins like wine, though it left her sober.
Herries, in the meantime, reached his house in a mood of elation so very
singular for him that, had he been like many of his countrymen of that
day, superstitious, he would have called it 'fey'--uncanny. Everything
seemed to be working together for his good; the stars in their courses
fought his battles. Through the least likely source in the world--his
cousin--he had found what promised to be the happiness of his life.
Approval and passion--how seldom they combine!--met in his tenderness
for Alison Graham. There might be other girls more beautiful and more
accomplished, but surely there was no other in the world so formed to
please him. How sensible she was! Would any other girl have condoned,
nay, actually have proposed, a courtship so shorn of the nonsense which
by long custom must needs beset all conventional affairs of the kind?
Herries reflected, with easy complacency, how exceedingly well it suited
him, at this juncture, that his betrothal should be kept a secret.
Creighton, he was certain, was either ill, or about to be ill, and
during his illness the affair of a new partnership would naturally be in
a decent abeyance. The strain of double work and double anxiety must
fall upon him, Herries, very severely in the immediate future, and how
inexpressibly inconvenient, at such a time, would have been the fuss and
the worry of a declared engagement. But there was to be no such foolish
demand upon his time and energy, no nonsense of a daily correspondence,
or lover-like dancing of attendance on his charmer. He was even bidden
not to go too often to the Potterrow! How infinitely to his taste, how
admirably suitable, it all was!
Yet, for a young man so perfectly pleased with a wise and sober
arrangement of things, that evening in his rooms seemed to pass with
extraordinary slowness,--in very truth, with the most appalling tedium.
He was restless; he could neither write nor read. He spent the lonely
hours lolling now in one chair, now in another, his handsome head thrown
back, his eyes beset with dreams. What he dreamed of was a room, so
much meaner than his own, a little room, ruddy with fire and candlelight
and cosy curtains, where there was a grey-eyed girl, the tinkle of a
harp, the notes of a song. He went furtively to a window and looked
out, with a certain thought in the back of his mind. But the night was
one of whirling snow, dark and wild, for the storm had come.
''Twould be madness to go; they'd think me crazy,' was the thought in
his mind. A clock struck, and he laughed. 'Why, they'll be away to
their beds!' he said. Certain strings, which appeared to be attached in
the neighbourhood of his heart, were pulling him, pulling him to the
Potterrow. But this time he withstood their wrenching, and taking a law
book from the shelf, set himself to read like a really sensible man.
*CHAPTER XXIX.*