night, with heavy rain-clouds hurrying from the west. Hardly an hour
before him Alison had trod those pavements, her face set to the New
Town, trying to hide herself as she went. Herries walked with his head
held high, conning over the stringent things that he should say in the
coming interview, yet striving also that he should be just and calm.
Jean opened to him with a glum face. Well did the honest servant know
that things were going wrong. Her sympathies were all with Alison.
'I have business with Miss Graham,' said Herries. 'Can I see her?'
'I doot no, sir,' said Jean. 'The young leddy is from home, and the
mistress ill in her bed.'
'I will come in and wait,' said Herries; 'but do not you disturb your
mistress--it is not necessary.' He felt a repugnance to seeing his
cousin; more lies, he told himself, and impotent anger on his own part,
would be the only result.
He walked into the parlour. The little room had an ominously neglected
and inhospitable air; the fire was nearly out, and the hard, lingering
light of the spring evening showed up all the shabbinesses of the little
nest, so kindly hid in the cosy winter hours. Herries threw himself into
a chair, prepared to wait. Half-an-hour dragged by and no one came. The
demon of restlessness got him, and he began to pace the room. He thought
he would see Nancy after all, and called Jean.
'Ask my cousin if she can see me,' he said, and at the same moment
Nancy's voice called to him faintly from her room. He entered it.
The invalid lay against a pile of pillows, in her pink wrapper, looking,
indeed, merely the ghost of herself. Her cheeks were pallid, her dark
eyes ringed, the lines upon her face were visibly deepened.
'Why, Nancy, I find you an invalid!' said Herries, in astonishment. 'I
fear I intrude; but my business is with Miss Graham to-night, and if you
can tell me where she is gone, or when she is likely to return, I will
not disturb you a moment longer.'
Nancy trembled, for all the terrors of discovery beset her. The courage
to answer her cousin coherently was not in her; her quivering lips would
hardly form her words.
'Ally is--is gone out,' she murmured. 'She did not tell me where. A
walk with Willy is her custom at this hour, and--'
'It is past seven o'clock,' said Herries, impatiently, 'and Willy is in
the kitchen with his books.' He frowned, and his eyes, full of
freshly-roused suspicion, searched Nancy's face. But a man cannot bully
a sick woman in her bed.
'I shall wait for Miss Graham,' he said shortly, as he turned on his
heel, 'if need be, till midnight.' He returned to the parlour, where
Jean had lit a candle, and continued his watch. Nancy, on her bed,
tossed to and fro, a prey to perfect agony of mind. It was more than
two hours since Alison had left the house. What had become of her?
Here was Herries on the trail of some discovery. The wretched little
woman saw herself upon the brink of ruin. She rolled over on her face,
biting the sheet between her chattering teeth, stiff and cold, and in a
kind of rigour.
In a rage of obstinacy, Herries waited on. The wag-at-the-wall clock
struck eight--the half-hour--then nine. He started up, and went to the
servant in her kitchen.
'Jean,' he said, and his voice had a curiously unnatural sound, 'I
cannot get from your mistress where Miss Graham is gone. Can you tell
me?' The woman hesitated, and then spoke out, bursting, indeed, with a
sense of Alison's wrongs, though about, alas! only to add to them.
'Gone?' she said. 'Weel ken I whar she's gone! Just where she's been
too often, sir, though I say it that am but a sairvant--'
'Take care what you do say,' said Herries, sternly. 'I have ears for no
idle gossip. Where did she go?'
'To Burns's lodging, sir,' said Jean, setting fire to a long trail,
'and, sir--'
'That's enough,' said Herries. His voice was quiet, but his action was
like lightning, and, before the slow-moving Scotchwoman could put out a
hand to stop him, or utter another word, he was out upon the stair and
in the street, making for St. James's Square as though the devil were
after him.
His haste undid him. Had he waited but a moment more, the flood-gates
of Jean's confidence would have been opened wide, and from the honest
creature's lips he would have learnt, if not the whole truth, yet enough
to light him to the rest. But that was not to be.
*CHAPTER XL.*
There is no ground for supposing that during his Edinburgh sojourn,
Robert Burns succumbed to those habits of intemperance which afterwards
destroyed him. It was an age of drink, and he no doubt drank, as did
nearly all his contemporaries, immoderately at times. But there is much
to show that in these days he was sober in his habits, for the most
part, and no record whatever that he disgraced himself by conspicuous
over-indulgence. The end of his visit, however, was inevitably a time
of trial in this respect. There were farewell visits to be paid to many
a roystering character and tavern companion; and the nature of such
farewells can easily be imagined, along with their result. On the day
succeeding his last visit to the Potterrow, Burns drank heavily,
impelled thereto by impulses less agreeable than those of mere
good-fellowship. When he turned into his lodging, which he did only a
few minutes before Herries reached the door, he was very drunk indeed.
He stumbled upstairs to the parlour. Nicol was there, and made him some
excited communication, pointing to the inner door. But the festive
condition of the Bard made him hopelessly dense to oral instruction. He
had not a notion what his excited friend was talking about.
'Man, pull yourself together,' cried Nicol, eagerly, hearing a knock
from below, and running to the window. 'As I'm alive, here's our cock
o' the walk seeking his bonny hen.'
'Who?' said the poet, confusedly.
'Herries, man, Herries!' shouted Nicol, slapping his thigh. 'The little
lawyer body ye were to lick. Wheesht! here he comes.'
'My enemy!' said the Bard, grandiloquently, with a dim feeling that a
great occasion was upon him. He half-sat, half-propped himself upon the
corner of the table, with arms folded across his chest. He was ruddy
with wine; his jet black hair was spread upon his brow; in the fine blue
and buff of his best suit, with his magnificent shoulders, his grand
head and lowering eye--it was impossible to deny, drunken though he was,
the splendour of his presence. To him, thus, and to Nicol, was ushered
Herries, white with anger, and a terrible vital excitement.
Herries walked straight to the figure on the table.
'Where--where is she?' he said, but he was hardly audible, for his
throat was parched. The poet lurched a little, but steadied himself
with an inimitable air of tipsy gravity.
'Speak up, ma billy!' he said. 'I'm dull the day.'
'I ask you--and you know it--where is Miss Graham?' said Herries, with
clenching hands.
The poet cocked an eyebrow.
'Nae man speirs at me for glaikit lasses,' he observed virtuously; 'you
are come to the wrong shop.'
Nicol burst into a coarse guffaw.
'Nay, sir,' he said, 'you are come right enough, though Rob, here, is
too modest to admit it. We hae your bonny bird safe and sound....
Here, mistress, come out now! there's ain to fetch you--' He flung open
the bedroom door, close to which he had stood, with his hand upon the
lock, since Herries's entry. And out of the dark room into the light
one walked Alison Graham.
Her face, her neck, her very hands, were white: they were drenched with
whiteness, so that she seemed more dead than alive; and the lines of her
face were drawn so deep, that it had suddenly lost the roundness and the
air of youth. Her wild eyes went from face to face with a hunted look;
the light hurt them, and she raised her hand, but it fell powerless,
while her look riveted itself at last on her lover.
'Alison!' said Herries. 'How ... how ...' But he could not speak. Yet
justice should be hers--that thought printed itself in fiery letters on
his reeling brain. Here--no matter that it was before these men, before
them or before the world--he would ask her why she stood there, and let
her clear herself if she could.
'Alison,' he said, going close up to her, 'whose shame is this--yours or
another's?'
Alison's eyes looked round the room in a vain search for help. They
fell on Nicol, who, crassly ignorant of the real circumstances of her
case, could hardly have helped her, and certainly would not if he could.
They fell on Burns, but Burns was drunk, and had he been sober, must
sooner have protected the woman he had nearly ruined than helpless
Alison. Alison's eyes fell to the ground, and all the long struggle of
the past weeks concentrated itself in the anguish of one moment's swift
decision. Her happiness, or Nancy's honour--which?
Her chin sank upon her breast: she seemed to shrink--the image of shame.
'I ... I have deceived you, sir,' she stammered, with lips that scarcely
moved.
It was the truth, but so little of it, and so hopelessly perverted!
Alison raised her eyes to her lover's face, and he should have read the
real truth in them, but he was blind.
'That's enough,' was all he said. 'I have asked and you have answered.
On your own head be it!'
For a few seconds no one moved in the dead silence. The poet, half
asleep, with his chin upon his chest, lurched and swayed, now one way,
and now another. Herries's eyes flamed, as they looked at him, with the
cold flame of disgust and hate.
'Your host is drunk,' he said to Alison, almost cavalierly. He had
become icily cool, and the crisp tones of his business manner came to
him, as though he stood in his own orderly office with a client in front
of him. 'I cannot leave you here, you understand,' he continued,
addressing her; 'you are in my relative's care, and I am her
representative. You must leave this house--for the present, at
least--and leave it with me.' He went to the door, and opened it, with
a gesture that seemed to command rather than to solicit her exit. No
one interfered, not even Nicol moved or spoke. With bowed head, Alison
walked slowly from the room. And as she did so, the swaying figure of
Burns, supine, fell prostrate on the table in a drunken sleep.
Out of doors it was raining, pouring with rain out of the black night
sky. Neither Alison nor her companion could shelter themselves, and the
gusty wind blew in their bent faces as they struggled along. A
link-boy's torch flashed at the corner of the square, and at the end of
Princes Street there was a pack of chairmen sheltering under a wall, for
it was an Assembly night.
'I will see you under shelter and in safety,' said Herries, speaking for
the first time. 'But after that I can never willingly see your face
again. Do you understand?' He had to raise his voice against the wind
and the hiss and patter of the rain.
'I understand,' said Alison; 'I expected nothing else,' she added
proudly. Yet the pride was for him, not herself. _He_ take that which
was smirched and spoiled? Not a fair one, but the fairest of all, must
be his, and how could she ever be fairest again--even though Herries
should know all--stained to the soul as she felt, after those
destroying, those damning hours in the squalid chamber of a libertine?
It would be a relief, she thought, to part. Oh, let him go! let him go!
He called a chair and handed her into it, punctiliously instructing and
paying the chairman. How it stabbed Alison that he should do this now.
How often, in the happy dealings of a man with a girlish guest, he had
paid such little sums on her behalf. But all that was over and done
with. And in the pelting rain, and in the dark, wordless they parted.
Alison felt in her pocket for Nancy's key. At least she had that and
her friend should be safe. She had seen it among a lot of untidy litter
on a table in her prison, and had had the sense and courage to take it.
That must be her reward.
* * * * *
At midnight, a white figure stood at Nancy's bedside. It was Alison,
with a light in her hand. After a brief and curiously dry account of
her adventure on her return home, she had gone to her room, but it was
not to sleep.
'Nancy,' she now said, 'I'm going home!' Nancy sat up in her bed.
'Home, child?' she cried. 'What do you mean? Oh--no--no! You'd never
leave me in my misery! You are frightened and upset. 'Twas an odious
adventure--some trick of that beast Nicol. But to-morrow you'll be
yourself again, Ally--my strength and comfort--my only one!'
'I got you the key,' said Alison, doggedly. 'I--I have done what I
could. But now I'm going home, and you must not prevent me.'
Nancy burst into tears.
'Oh--Ally!' she sobbed, 'there's something between us!'
'Yes,' said Alison, dully, 'there's something between me and all the
world from to-day. But I'll go home and hide myself--and forget.
You'll not rise, Nancy,' she went on, 'for I've been to Jean and she
will help me away. The coach goes at five--to-morrow is the day for it,
you know, and I could not wait another week. I'll come in and say
good-bye before I go.' Nancy turned her face to the wall, and sobbed
and wept. But Alison's eyes were dry.
A few hours later she stood in Nancy's room again, in the grey dawn,
hooded and cloaked for her journey. But her little friend had drugged
herself into a deep sleep, and Alison did not wake her. In one of her
tiny hands--the hand that had loaded Alison with easy kindness and
covered her with a blame and shame not hers--was clasped the unlucky
key. She breathed deeply and peacefully with parted lips--those lips
made for laughter and for love--the swollen eyelids fringed and closed,
the dark hair scattered on the pillow. Alison stood and looked at her
long, without resentment, without love, without feeling of any kind, for
feeling was numb with her now. Then she turned away, and went and
kissed Willy in his sleep. And there were no other farewells.
'I doubt you are leaving us in trouble, Miss Ally!' said kindly Jean.
She stood at the coach door--the March wind scattering the scanty locks
upon her rough, broad forehead--loth to part from the young lady she had
liked and served through all these winter weeks.
'Yes, Jean,' said Alison, sadly,' good-bye.'
'But, oo--it'll a' win richt i' the end?' said the cheerful woman,
tentatively.
'No--never!' answered Alison, with the tremendous finality of youth.
The horn sounded, the whip cracked, and the lumbering vehicle lurched on
its way. And so Alison went back to The Mains.
*CHAPTER XLI.*
It might have been about eight o'clock the next morning when Lizzie, the
old housekeeper in George Street, thrust her head in at her master's
door.
'Maircy me!' she exclaimed, and there was some cause for her wonder in
the sight, at that hour, of candles burning in the broad day, and
Herries at his desk, where, indeed, he had been all night.
Sleep had left him and thought had become intolerable. With an effort
almost superhuman he had determined to lose himself in the
technicalities of his work, and he had done it. But he now looked, with
bloodshot eyes, his tumbled linen and disordered hair, the living image
of dissipation rather than business. Lizzie eyed him most suspiciously.
He never drank, but the censorious old woman believed he had been
drinking.
'The Lord be gude to us!' she ejaculated, 'what's wrang? Wastin' waxen
candles this gait!' And she blew them out, and snuffed them with her
fingers. 'You're wanted,' she went on. 'There's a lad frae Creighton's
wi' a message express. Ye maun gang there at aince anent the dog.'
'What about the dog?' said Herries.
'Weel,' said Lizzie, 'as far as I can get it frae the lad, the tyke is
turned upon them all, and aye he sits girning by the corp, and they
canna get it coffined. They're for you to gang and fleech him awa', or
somethin' that gait.'
'I will come,' said Herries.
Creighton's unfortunate canine companion had given some trouble already,
which Herries had not grudged. Within the hour of his master's death,
when it was necessary that the last offices should be done, Herries had
coaxed the poor starving brute from his post upon the bed, tempting him
with a piece of meat. But no sooner was the morsel swallowed than the
creature ran back to the room of death, and scratching at the door,
pushed in and leapt upon the bed. Nothing had since dislodged him, and
Herries had ordered him to be left in peace--a solitary mourner. It had
been a mistaken kindness, for thirst had probably now turned the beast
rabid. Herries took a pistol out of its case, and primed and loaded it.
For Dick there could only be the kindly ultimatum of a bullet.
He went straight to Mr. Creighton's lodgings. It was the same March
morning, windy, but now fair, which was seeing Alison on her sad way
home. The wind cut him like a knife, though it was not really cold. He
had eaten nothing for many hours, and a wretchedness of spirit was upon
him, beyond anything that he had deemed it possible he could know.
In Creighton's room the coffin stood upon its trestles, and stiff and
still, beneath the sheet upon the bed, lay its belated occupant. At the
starkly upturned feet crouched the terrier, his red eyes glowing like
cinders, at every slightest sound or movement drawing his lips back from
his teeth in a rabid snarl. Herries approached him, with a half hope
the dog would know him and be pacified, but the brute would have sprung
at him in a moment. He drew back sufficiently far to take a deliberate
and steady aim.
The shot rang out with terrific reverberation within the narrow, echoing
limits of the empty room, which filled instantly with a blue and pungent
smoke. When that cleared off, Herries perceived the dog had hardly
moved, arrested in his crouching attitude by swift death. Presently a
single scarlet trickle from behind his ear stained the whiteness of his
master's shroud, his fierce eye dimmed and glazed, and his bristling
body stiffened as it lay.
Herries, the smoking pistol in his hand, stood still a moment--in his
disordered dress, and with his pale, set face and bloodshot eyes, a
singularly haunting image of the suicide. But just as some men, too
strong to swoon, must bear a physical agony to its last limit, so to
Herries, with the accurately-balanced character of his intellect and his
temper, the impulse of self-destruction could never come. He must bear,
he would overcome: the iron will survived; the brain, active and
restless, keen and clear, worked on--a finely-regulated mechanism. But
his heart was empty, and from that moment he closed its portals on the
world.
* * * * *
*CHAPTER XLII.*
Time, who is the great healer, does his work with admirable celerity for
some. By the spring of that year, though there came to her in the early
weeks of April the astounding news of Burns's marriage to Jean Armour,
Mrs. Maclehose had resumed the peaceful tenor of her blameless existence
as a cruelly deserted wife and anxious mother. This little vessel, so
lightly rigged, so fairy-like, with sails and pennants spread for none
but summer breezes, had encountered rough weather, but had survived with
wonderfully little hurt. Helmsman and pilot, perchance, had suffered,
and an honest seaman or so gone by the board; but the spirit of the
little ship, undaunted, rode lightly on the calm. The little Edinburgh
world of Mrs. Maclehose's acquaintances observed with edification her
devotion to her delicate youngest boy. She, indeed, moved herself and
her small household to Prestonpans for a season, where he lay. In the
August of that year little Danny died, and it may be said most
truthfully that no child ever winged his way from earth to heaven from
tenderer maternal arms.
For all the rest of Nancy's doings are they not written in more books
than one, so that he who runs may read? It is to be conjectured that
her relations with her cousin became tacitly somewhat strained after the
events recorded in this history, although there was no open quarrel. It
seems probable that Herries, after Danny's death, and in the hardness of
heart which grew upon him at this time, withdrew the superfluities, at
anyrate, of the monetary assistance he had been in the habit of
conveying to his relative.
This may have been one of the contributing causes to the curious impulse
which, about the autumn of the year '91, moved Nancy to think of
rejoining her long-lost husband, and induced her to undertake a voyage
to the West Indies with that laudable end in view. The journey was not
a success. She, indeed, found Mr. Maclehose with little difficulty, but
she found along with him the partner of his exile, a swarthy lady of
those climes, with a numerous coffee-colored progeny. And this discovery
so shocked the moral sensibilities of the little lady, who had regarded
with a lenient eye the amorous delinquencies of her Sylvander, that she
incontinently fled the marital premises, and returned to Leith in the
same vessel that had brought her out. The most remarkable feature of
this episode is the fact that Robert Burns, although at this time nearly
three years married, did indubitably come to Edinburgh to seek a
farewell interview with his Clarinda. How they two met, with what
feelings, with what memories, who shall be bold enough to say? The
world, at least, became infinitely the richer for this parting and for
poor Clarinda's absence. For the poet's soul was stirred, and soon fine
Edinburgh ladies at the harp and spinet, and country lasses at their
milking, were singing, to its melting air,--
_'Now in her green mantle blythe Nature arrays,_
_And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes,_
_While birds warble welcome in ilka green show,_
_But to me it's delightless--my Nannie's awa'._
_The snaw-drap and primrose our woodlands adorn,_
_And violets bathe in the weet o' the morn;_
_They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blow,_
_They mind me o' Nannie--and Nannie's awa'._
_Thou lav'rock that springs frae the dews o' the lawn,_
_The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn;_
_And thou mellow mavis that hails the night-fa'_
_Give over for pity--my Nannie's awa'.'_
And also of this curious farewell were born those lines in which is
reached, perhaps, the very topmost summit of the lyrical genius of
Burns--those lines which are the epitome of all love-tragedy--of all
hopeless passion--of all parting woe. And these shall the painstaking
reader, who toils to the end of this history, read on the last page for
his reward.
Sylvander and Clarinda continued to correspond with considerable
desultoriness during the few years of life that remained to the Rhymer,
and sad to state, in these communications there is to be traced a very
decided recriminative tartness, which is a blow to the ingenuous and
sentimental reader. So sputtered out, in rather fiery sparks--as,
indeed, is the too common wont of such--one of the most curious of the
world's classic flirtations.
Mrs. Maclehose lived to a great age, becoming a most _espiegle_ and
charming old lady--the centre of a large and admiring acquaintance.
Years after the poet's death, when all danger was over, and passion,
too, dead, it was her chief boast, her 'meed of fame,' to figure as
Burns's 'Clarinda.' She kept, and would exhibit, many little souvenirs
of the Bard, and on all matters pertaining to the history of his
Edinburgh visits, she was for many years the greatest living authority.
She publicly and impartially would maintain till the last that the
poet's marriage with a peasant was the greatest mistake of his life,
dragging him down to a low level, intellectually as well as socially;
whereas with higher companionship he might have risen to heights
incalculably nobler, both of prosperity and of fame. To her dying day
she expressed a pious wish that she might meet in heaven the Bard whose
soul she felt that she alone had understood as it deserved in the
imperfect communionship of earth. All things considered, the hope of
meeting in quite another quarter might have seemed more justifiable.
But so--exit our charming Nancy from these veracious pages.