brew a fine broth out of this bonny concatenation, the devil take us for
silly, shiftless bodies! I'm none so loth, I can tell you, to have a
fling at miss for all her haughty airs. You shall pretend to love her.
Write to Master Lawyer; tell him you never dreamed to lift presumptuous
eyes to his worship's exquisite relative, but are contented with her
governante--or whatsoever the lass is. I'm thinking that will do our
trick.'
'Eh?' said the poet, doubtfully. He was dazed with wine, and hardly
understood the nature of that which was proposed to him. Nicol got the
ink-pot, a sheet of paper, and a pen, which he thrust into his friend's
somewhat unsteady hand.
'Write, now,' he began eagerly--'something in this style: "Honoured
sir"--(letters in the third person are so damnably difficult to put, I
can't away with them!)--"Honoured sir: I am in due receipt of your late
favour, which hath awaited me at my lodging this long time in my absence
on a journey. I crave your pardon for this delay in answering the same.
I also crave your patience for offence given in the matter of my visits
to the house of your honourable cousin, Mistress Maclehose. But sure,
sir, you were not so mistaken, on the one occasion that we met there, as
to confuse the object of my attention with any other. It was most
assuredly not--as, sir, you might have seen--your honour's relative,
who, in truth, is far above my sphere, but the young female abiding with
her at this time. And I would humbly beg of your kindness not to
interrupt this little affair of an honourable affection, which is like
to be in a fair way to become reciprocal...."'
'"Reciprocal"!' said Burns, pausing, with a confused laugh. 'Man, but
that's a muckle lee! The lass hates me, sure's death--I know not why.'
'Then serve her right the more,' said Nicol, now bent upon mischief. He
had a peculiar leaning to the coarse, practical joke, and was entirely
callous to the sufferings of his victims in such cases, even had they
done nothing to provoke his spite. The Bard looked yet a little
doubtful, and bungled over the letter. Had he been perfectly sober, it
is unlikely that he would have lent himself to a device so mean and
cowardly. Actions of this kind were not natural to him by any means,
for, at anyrate, where men were concerned, he was honest and
straightforward in his dealings. But Nicol poured a stream of specious
arguments into his buzzing ears; all was fair in love and war--and this
was both--and all that his letter, at the worst, would lead to was a
lover's quarrel, which would doubtless be patched up far sooner than the
delinquents at all deserved. Thus cajoled, the poet finished and folded
up the letter, and consented to its dispatch.
Then he fell to brooding over Herries's note again, and over that
clearness came to him on one point at anyrate. For to this hot-blooded
son of Adam the high-handed prohibition it contained was fuel added to
his flame. He had all but virtuously resolved to cut matters short with
his Clarinda; but now that resolution went to the four winds, and a very
different one sprang into determination in its place. He scrawled a
letter to the Potterrow, to which both wine and passion lent a warmth he
had hardly yet dared to express. And Nicol sallied forth with both
epistles--this time, in spite of the lateness of the hour, with no
complaints.
*CHAPTER XXXVII.*
Mrs. Maclehose, on the following evening, stood in the window of her
little room, lost in agitating thought. The poet's impassioned letter
was in the bosom of her dress, and seemed to burn her, but with a
delicious pain. At almost any other juncture of her commerce with the
man it would have frightened her; for the little woman, in spite of her
impetuosity, had some obscure element of the national caution in her
nature. But now she was in a state when caution must give way to the
fiercer and more primitive passions. For nearly three weeks now she had
suffered a frenzy of jealous love, and during the absence of her friend,
as she called him, was not only tortured with a longing for the sight of
him, but also with horrible fears of his infidelity. She had pictured
him as returned within the sphere of the influence of Jean Armour--a
person she insisted upon regarding as a low-minded, artful hussy with
designs upon the Bard. License to almost any degree she would allow the
man, whose nature she made allowances for with an amazing liberality; it
was the idea of matrimony she dreaded with an anguish of jealous dread.
But the poet's letter had brought ample reassurance: he was returned to
his Clarinda, more in love with her--more impassioned, than when he went
away. He implored for an interview that night, but it must be private.
He had matters to discuss of the utmost importance, but they were for
her ear alone. He conjured her, by all that was most sacred in love and
friendship, to let no third person intrude upon the happiness of their
first reunion. Well ... she would not tell Alison that he came, and
Alison would go to bed: that was all. But then, the girl slept so
light, and had an ear so sensitive ... she must, in that confined space,
hear voices...? Nancy knit her soft brows, and behind them, her busy,
tortuous little brain made plans.
Alison had been out of doors with Willy that afternoon, and returned
somewhat late. It was a blustering spring evening, with a shrewd edge
to the wind, and when the girl came into the parlour at the late
tea-time there was an unquestionable redness about her eyelids. Alas! it
was not the wind that smirched her fair good looks, but tears. For poor
Alison, in these days, would cry a little, uncomforted, in her closet,
choking back the tears.
'Why, Ally, you have got the cold!' said Nancy. 'I can see it in your
eyes.' Alison turned quickly from the light.
'I never get the cold,' she said. But Nancy insisted, and harped upon
the ailment--she was convinced that Alison had an influenza coming.
'When you go to bed, which I'd have you do early, love,' she said
purringly, 'I'll give you something that will check the horrid thing. A
few drops of _aqua vitae_ in water are infallible at an early stage.'
Healthy Alison, who took no medicine stuff, would stoutly have rebelled
at any other time, but now she was anxious to divert attention from her
red eyes, and promised to take the remedy. When bedtime came, Nancy
bade her undress and get into her bed and she would bring her the dose
with her own hands.
She was away some little time in her own room, and Alison heard the
clink of glass against glass as she prepared the decoction. Water had
gone into it, and a few drops of the _aqua vitae_, which turned the
water into an opaque whiteness. And then Nancy had paused and looked
round her with a guilty look. She took another bottle from the shelf
beside her bed, and measured a portion of its contents into the
half-full wine glass. It was her own sleeping draught--a half dose.
It must not for an instant be supposed that there was anything of the
villain in Nancy's composition, or that she intended to do her friend
the smallest injury. She well knew that the sleeping draught was of the
mildest order--a perfectly harmless drug, as the physician had
positively assured her. And she put in only the half dose.
Nevertheless, as she carried it into the girl's room, and gave it to
her, it was with an averted look. She could not bear to meet Alison's
eyes, and her little hand so shook that a part of the liquid was spilt
upon the sheet. Then she hurriedly kissed her friend, put out the
light, and left her.
Alison lay awake some time, for, upon perfectly healthy nerves, a
sleeping draught will occasionally have the reverse of its intended
effect. She seemed to get a headache and to become restless. She heard
Nancy's movements in her room with peculiar distinctness, and supposed
that her friend was preparing for bed. In reality, the deluded little
woman was changing her dress from a common to a dainty one--adding, in
every ribbon and coaxed trick of curl, to the danger that awaited
her--moving furtively, with many a pause, to listen if Alison stirred,
or Jean in the attic above. Then a kind of buzzing drowsiness came over
Alison--disagreeable, because she seemed to want to fight against it.
But it overcame her; and then for some hours she did certainly sleep,
and much more heavily than was her wont.
When she awoke, it was with a confused, unpleasant feeling, and the
sound of voices in her ears. The room was dark, but a line of light
showed under the door. Alison sat up and listened. A curious,
nightmare-like sense of danger was upon her, indefinably oppressive. Her
ears were acute. She heard Nancy's voice, and a man's voice,
unmistakably. Clearness came to her, though her temples throbbed and
the drug she had been given buzzed in her head. She slipped to the
floor, searched for, but could not find her shoes, groped for her
wrapper, and threw it over her shoulders. She crept to the door and
lifted the latch noiselessly.
The passage lamp was out, but the parlour was in a glow of brightness.
The door had swung open with its old trick, and a stream of light came
from it. In brilliant relief the little room and all it held stood out.
And, in the circle of light, unconscious of all save each other, they
stood--the tempter and the tempted. And behind Alison the big
wag-at-the-wall clock, with a guilty twang, struck one.
One of Robert Burns's great labouring hands was clenched, and he leaned
heavily on the table with it. Alison could see the veins in it throb and
swell with the hot, ungovernable blood. His other arm held
Nancy--Nancy, whose little trembling hands covered her face--and who
turned, as Alison watched her, to hide it against the man's powerful
shoulder. The poet's face was in shadow, for it was bent over the
woman. He spoke, but his voice was low and thick; Alison could not
catch the words.
She only looked at them a moment, just till the clock struck. Then they
moved with a start, and she also moved forward, until she too stood in
the circle of light. Petrified, the lovers saw her both at
once,--staring, chapfallen, as though they beheld a spirit: only a girl,
indeed, with bare feet, and in her nightgown, sleep still in her wide
eyes and curls scattered on her shoulders, but hedged about with the
immutable dignity of innocence, and strong with the strength of right.
She walked straight up to Nancy, and with a little jerk of effort took
her into her own arms from the man's embrace, facing him boldly.
'It is too late for visitors here, sir,' she said simply. 'Mrs.
Maclehose would have you go.'
The poet's arms dropped to his side and his jaw fell. His sun-browned
face had become quite pale, and the words which stammered on his lips
would not get themselves spoken. When he moved it was to fumble for his
hat. Then he made for the door, without a look or word for those he
left; and it might be said that he slunk, then and there, from the room
and from the house.
Nancy had slipped from Alison's arms and lay on the floor in a little
huddled heap, moaning. Alison tried to raise her, but she would not
rise.
'Come, Nancy, come to bed,' whispered the girl. 'You are cold--you are
shaking.' She lifted her, and then Nancy stood up, staring round her
with miserable, unseeing eyes--deadly pale, and utterly dishevelled.
'I--I slipped,' she said, in a curious dazed way. 'I--slipped--and
nearly fell, Ally.'
'Here's my hand,' said Alison. And then, half leading and half carrying
her, the girl took the wretched little woman to her bed.
*CHAPTER XXXVIII.*
Alison watched all night long beside her friend. Nancy never let go her
hand, but lay holding it, at first in a kind of wretched stupor, staring
straight before her, with dry, miserable eyes; then in a sort of palsy
of convulsive shivering, and at last in a fit of hysterical weeping, so
violent that it seemed to tear her little frame to pieces. Alison
soothed and comforted her as best she could, but at first neither peace
nor comfort came. The girl's own thoughts were full of bewilderment.
Here, in truth, was love--a creature shaken by it through all the
innermost places of her being. Alison, too, loved--but then, how
differently! Was it the same passion--this, that destroyed her friend,
and that which raised her own soul to heights never dreamed of before
she had known Herries? Presently Nancy fell into the light doze of
sheer exhaustion, and Alison was able to go and dress herself.
But her troubles were by no means over, for Nancy awoke to a plight most
piteous--a mental condition almost impossible to cope with. Like one,
who, saved from some horrible fate by accident or misadventure, is
haunted by phantasmal death in every form, so Nancy, with the tremendous
recoil of every natural womanly feeling, beheld herself, again and yet
again, on the verge of the great and terrible abyss from which she had
been so narrowly and so barely saved. Her mind clung now, with the
painful obstinacy and insistence of hysteria, to every symbol and
outward sign of safety. Could these stumbling steps of hers be hid?
Could she resume, before the men and women of her world, the steady gait
of blameless womanhood? With words that harrowed Alison's very soul,
she protested her actual innocence, while she bemoaned the folly that
had made her risk her reputation. Oh, she had been
mad--blind--headstrong! She saw it all now.
'All my life, Ally,' she said, her sweet voice roughened with long
crying--'all my life I've been guided by the impulse of the moment. My
passion has done what it will with me, and now it has undone me
utterly.' Then she fell to harping on the theme of secrecy. Was there
anyone who would betray her? How much did Jean know, and did she
gossip? And Alison--Alison, who knew all--oh, was she sure of herself?
Would she never--never by word, or look, or sign--betray her friend?
'Will you swear to me, Ally, that you'll never tell?' cried Nancy,
raising herself in bed. 'I'd be easier if you'd swear upon the Bible
never to betray me!'
'Nay,' said Alison, proudly, 'I'll not swear. Have I ever lied to you
that you should ask an oath? But I'll promise you, Nancy, by all you've
been to me, and done for me, that no word of mine shall ever tell your
secret to any human being.' Nancy sank back among her pillows with a
sigh of relief.
'Then I'm safe,' she said, 'for _he_ will never betray me; to kiss and
tell is not his nature. He is all the noblest generosity! Don't think
my love is dead, Ally,' she added in something of her old tones. 'It
lives, and it will live, purified. I'll tear the earthly part of it
from my heart, and live in hopes that we may meet in heaven!' Soothed
by this interesting and sanguine reflection, Nancy grew calmer. She
took a little of her sleeping medicine, and Alison was just beginning to
look forward to an hour of peace, when she awoke with a scream. 'Oh,
God!' she cried aloud, 'my key!'
'Hush, Nancy; Jean will hear you,' said Alison, patiently. 'What key?'
'My key,' reiterated Nancy, working herself up into a passion of terror;
'my house key. Oh! fool that I was! I gave it to him in all innocence:
it was before your own eyes, Alison, and only to save Jean when she was
throng. It has an ivory label to it, with my name and the street's
name, and if it is found with him I am undone--undone!' She twined her
fingers in her hair and would have torn it but that Alison held her
hands. Alison herself looked blank enough; the matter of the key struck
her as a bad business, incriminating evidence enough in the hands of
such a man as Burns--careless, if he was not malicious, and, like all
men, leaving things about. 'Ally, as you love me, you must go and get
it from him!' said Nancy; 'I'll not trust the matter upon paper. I must
have a messenger, and that messenger must be you.'
'Nay, but that's too much!' cried Alison, turning white.
'Too much?' said Nancy, piteously. 'Too much to save your friend whom
you have promised to save? Oh, Ally, pity me--pity me--and go!' She put
up her trembling arms and caught Alison about the neck, clinging to her.
'If I go,' said poor Alison, desperately, 'will you promise me one
thing, Nancy--never, never to send me on another message to this man?'
'Never! I swear!' cried Nancy. 'Oh, Ally, I've been wrong to do it so
often, most hideously selfish and wrong so to have used your
good-nature. But you'll forgive me, for I knew not what I did!'
Alison met the inevitable with a kind of cold, white calm. Her very
flesh shrank from the thought of meeting Burns, of being near him and
breathing the same air. Now she must not only go to his house, but in
all probability enter it, doing that which, to anyone not acquainted
with the intricacies of the affair and her own obscure part in it, was,
on the face of it, open to the gravest misconstruction. Should Herries
know of it--what then? But a kind of despair had come to Alison on this
point. She must do what she had to do; it was all a ghastly mistake, a
growing and intolerable injustice, but she must blunder on with it now.
She was the same Alison, and in the same mood, who had desperately
promised in Jacky's twilight nursery, weeks ago, to marry Mr. Cheape
because duty drove her to it, and she saw no other way.
It was agreed that she should wait till nearly dusk before setting out,
and it was, perhaps, five or six o'clock before she left the house. She
hurried through the familiar streets, choosing the obscurer ones, and
keeping in the shadow--haunted by a sense of the guilt which was not
hers. She stood at last before the odiously familiar door in St.
James's Square, and knocked. It was opened to her by Nicol, and
Alison's flesh crept, for she loathed the man, and feared him now--she
knew not why.
'Is Mr. Burns within?' she asked in a low voice. Nicol looked her up and
down with an indescribable insolence.
'No, mistress,' he said, 'he's not.'
'Will he be in soon?' Alison forced herself to ask.
'Are you that anxious to see him?' said Nicol, with a leer. Alison drew
herself up, with a passionate scorn, though she trembled in every limb.
'I have important business with Mr. Burns,' she faltered, 'and desire an
interview.'
'Ay, oh, ay, I understand!' said Nicol. 'Well, mistress, come in and
wait. Rob's door is never closed to bonny lasses.' He held the door
wide. Behind his uncouth figure opened a vista of dingy passage, ending
in a stair. Alison hesitated, half drew back; to cross that threshold
was horrible to her; it seemed to put her in the power of men--of bad
men. She held her hand to her heart--it fluttered so--and cast a
longing look down the empty street. Oh, for some help! But no help
came.
'If there is some room where I could wait--alone' ... she began, with an
unlucky inflection on the last word, which Nicol's ear caught, and
bitterly resented.
'Oh, ay, there's a room where you can be private,' answered Nicol, with
suspicious blandness. 'Come up the stair.' He led the way, and Alison
followed in the close, malodorous darkness.
Burns occupied two rooms on the first floor of the house, a parlour and
sleeping-closet communicating. It was into the former of these that
Nicol ushered Alison--a disorderly and ill-kept room, with a bottle and
glasses on the table, and articles of a man's wearing apparel strewn
about upon the chairs and floor.
''Tis no room for a fine miss like you,' said Nicol, with dangerous
politeness. 'I'll take it upon myself to usher you into our sanctum
sanctorum--'tis more genteel.'
'But if this is the parlour,' said Alison, looking round her nervously,
and perhaps beginning a little to lose her head, 'if this is the
parlour, had I not better remain here?'
'No, no,' said Nicol, speciously, 'we have the other--much more private.
Here anyone may come at any moment, you see, and if your business is
private--' It was a touch of devilish cunning, for terror seized Alison
at the thought of an intrusion.
'If, then, you think it wiser--' she said, looking about her with
startled eyes.
'Ay, come away--much wiser'--said Nicol. 'See here!' He held open the
door of the inner room--its only entrance--and Alison walked in. The
moment her feet were over the threshold, Nicol slammed-to the door upon
her, and locked it with a loud report.
'There, my bonny bird!' he called, his grinning mouth to the panel;
'we've got you safe and sound! Are ye "alone" enough in there for your
taste? 'Od, it's there you'll bide till Rob comes hame and lets ye
out!' He exploded in a fit of laughter; here was a piece of horse-play
after his own heart.
Stunned and stupid, Alison had tottered a few steps into the inner room.
A bed in the corner, unmade since the morning, showed that it was the
poet's sleeping chamber. And she was trapped beyond all possibility of
escape.
*CHAPTER XXXIX.*
The letter which Nicol had conveyed from Burns to Herries lay unopened
at the office of the latter for a matter of about, perhaps, thirty-six
hours. Delivered very late in the evening, it was not conveyed to
Herries that night, because he had already retired. In the early
morning hours he was summoned to the death-bed of his partner, and he
only returned from that melancholy scene in order, after a hurried meal,
to set off to a remote village in the Pentlands, where, under an
engagement with the dead man, he must make arrangements for the funeral.
Returning at night, dog-tired, after many hours spent in the saddle (for
it had been necessary to go on horseback), he had not then attempted to
examine his correspondence. But the first letter that he opened in the
morning was that from St. James's Square.
He sat still after its perusal--stunned. The morning sun streamed in
through the three long windows of his fine room, and found him, perhaps
on hour later, still sitting motionless, the letter in his hand. The
anguish of surprise was not his, for, after all, the letter contained
mere confirmation of long-latent suspicion. But it came as a fearful
blow nevertheless. Here was a man who had expected little of men and
women, but he had got less than he expected after all. He had believed
that he had cherished no illusions, and dreamed no dreams; but the
modest hopes that he had allowed himself to entertain of faith in one
human being, whom he loved, were dashed. The cynic's disgust, as well
as the man's heart-wrung sorrow, was his portion.
Yet Herries was a lawyer, keen of vision, and trained in the detection
of deceit, and to him that letter actually did smack false at the first
reading, and afterwards also. He had heard much, as was inevitable, of
the sturdy independence of the peasant poet; certainly this letter was
not the letter of such a man. It was a suspiciously subservient, an
actually cringing letter, and in every line rang false. Yet Herries
knew, and recognised at once, the poet's handwriting; for Burns's
letters at that day were often handed round the town as curiosities, and
the young lawyer had seen at least a score. A certain wearied languor
had come over Herries, numbing his faculties, so that in this matter
they had almost ceased to serve him. He told himself that his love was
dead--nipped by this long frost of cold suspicion, and ruined forever by
this base association with men and ways unclean and devious. Yet he was
a just man, and he would not condemn Alison unheard. He had already
given her the chance of explanation and defence; he would give it her
again. He would seek her out, and he would confront her with the
letter--ask her if it were true or false. He would make her speak; and
those grave lips that he had kissed so often: those candid eyes--that
indescribably childlike wide innocence of brow that had been Alison's
charm, rather than and (to him) beyond all beauty--well, he should learn
once for all if they lied, and were only the fair outer covering of
deceit and blackness. It was impossible that he could be absent again
during office hours, for the previous day had been a blank one, and the
pressure of the accumulated work of the past weeks was becoming daily
more unendurable. But in the evening he would go to the Potterrow, and
put an end to the mysteries that destroyed his peace.