brought solitary success and lonely gain. He set himself to his work
with an iron determination to forget the past, and it seemed that he
succeeded. To him Alison Graham was dead, as truly dead as though she
lay in yonder graveyard under the shadow of the Castle rock, with a
great stone to weight her down until the Judgment Day. He never thought
of her at all. He never pictured his room now as a drawing-room, with
gracious feminine appurtenances; it was the office, pure and simple. In
Creighton's room below worked his new partner, a young and stirring man.
The business extended itself in all directions and flourished like a
miracle. Some of the most resounding names in Scotland figured on the
green tin boxes, in their yearly increasing phalanx, in Herries's room.
He had the name of a hard man, and was, no doubt, rather feared than
loved. But so he willed it--for he had had enough of love. Round him,
in these busy years, grew wider and yet wider the gallant New Town of
Edinburgh--curving into crescents, and widening into squares and
handsome residential streets. More and more, the genteel world
gravitated to this quarter, and left the Old Town to the squalor of
decay. Herries, for one, never visited the old streets and
closes--giving in, no doubt, to the new fashion. The High Street was
his limit; the devious and narrow ways which led to the Potterrow knew
him no more.
And meanwhile, down in the rich south country, in the little white
farmhouse among the broom, on the bonny banks of Nith, Robert Burns
pursued the downward tenor of his way. Poet and exciseman, farmer and
bard: the kindly husband and father, the incorrigible rake: the eager
host, the far too frequent--and far, far too uproariously
welcomed--guest: the copious correspondent, the ill-balanced politician:
the reckless, eager, revolutionary spirit, the remorse-stricken,
disappointed, penitent man; at once affectionate and quarrelsome--losing
friend after friend, and tiring out the patience of men and women who
would fain have befriended him to the last; quixotically generous in
money matters, refusing money for his songs, and then forced to accept,
in grinding bitterness of spirit, the eleemosynary five-pound note under
pressure of inexorable necessity--so he stands out, a tragic figure for
all time, the presiding genius, the Rhymer of the North. Too soon the
fair page--or that which had promised so fair--of the life at Elliesland
had to be turned down, the stock and plenishing of the little farm
scattered and sold, and the patient Jean and her little flock of
helpless bairns made to flit sadly to Dumfries. Here the temptations of
the country town and its taverns soon finished what the too trying and
demoralising routine of the Excise had begun; and in the squalor of
excess--in sadness, illness, disillusionment and pain--the shining light
of genius grew dim, and flickered to extinction.
*CHAPTER XLIII.*
As time went on, and his fortune accumulated, there came to Archibald
Herries that impulse which generally visits the laborious and
land-loving Scot at some period of his career--the impulse to possess
himself of territorial acres--the ancestral ones if possible. The
family from which Herries sprang had owned land in the Galloway region,
or near about Kirkcudbright. It occurred to him suddenly, in the summer
of '96, when town was empty, and the grass growing up between the
cobbles of the Edinburgh streets, after its rural wont, that he would
take a tour in the South and re-visit the country of his sires. He set
out with a couple of good nags--one ridden by his servant, with a
pack-saddle.
It was a successful expedition (all worldly matters prospered with
Herries in these days), and in more ways than in mere pleasure. Not
only did he see the country to advantage in the fine summer weather, but
he discovered that a small property, with its excellent mansion house,
which had once been the ancient possession of a younger branch of his
family, was for sale. There seemed no reason--certainly not want of
funds--why he should not become the purchaser. It might have occurred
to him to ask himself why he, unmarried and childless, should burden
himself with acres never to become an inheritance. But no such
consideration gave him pause. He was inwardly determined that, at the
first moment he thought fit to do so, he should marry--ay, and beget
sons to carry on his name and fame. True, that moment had never come;
but it was not for love's sake that it tarried--or so he was convinced.
It was on his return journey that he stayed for a few nights at
Dumfries. With his pleasure-trip he had combined a certain modicum of
business, and the affairs of an important client detained him in the
country-town longer than he meant. In the long, summer evenings he
would stroll about the streets, losing himself in its little vennels and
closes, and stopping every now and then to stare about him, as a man
will in a place that is strange to him. That Dumfries was becoming
famous as the last home of the man who had practically ruined his life,
Herries may have known, but only vaguely. The fashionable world had
dropped the poet Burns. The town roared over 'Tam o' Shanter' when it
appeared, but forgot to pension the unlucky bard struggling with his
poverty on the banks of Nith.
It was one morning, as he sat at breakfast in his tavern, that a
messenger brought Herries a note. It was written in a sprawling,
uncertain hand, and was unsigned, undated and unaddressed. It ran--'A
dying fellow-creature uses the privilege of his sad condition to summon
Mr. Herries to his house. It may be that Mr. Herries will there hear
that which might be of importance to his affairs.' Herries turned the
note over with an incredulous smile. Who in Dumfries could know of
anything that was of importance to him? A little boy waited to guide him
to the house of his correspondent. Herries thought that he would go.
The mystery would help to pass an idle morning.
The child led him a little way down the hill, and guided him to a small
and humble street called, as Herries observed, the Wee Vennel. They
stopped before a decent two-storeyed house, like an artisan's dwelling
of the better class.
'Here, my boy,' said Herries, giving the child a shilling, 'can't you
tell me who it is that desires to see me?'
'No. I was not to say, sir,' answered the boy. He was a fine little
fellow of about nine or ten, and as he spoke he raised his large black
eyes--surely Herries had seen eyes just like these before--to the
stranger's face.
The door was opened by a quiet-looking, young woman with a sweet face,
but Herries did not then observe her with any particularity. She asked
him gently to walk upstairs. At the door of a room opening to the left,
she paused.
'You will be very quiet, will you not, sir?' she asked. 'You'll not
excite him? He has not long to live.' She had a quiet, controlled, and
yet a very sad voice. Herries then noticed her wedding-ring, and also
the fact that she seemed very near her time. She opened the door to the
sick-room, and left him.
The room was cross-lighted by two windows set in opposite walls, and by
one of these, which was opened to the street and to the summer air and
sunshine, was drawn a great chair, where someone sat, propped by a pile
of pillows. A very pretty young girl in the rustic style sat near with
an open book upon her knee, from which she had been reading aloud. She
rose as Herries entered, and quietly left the room. It was Jessie
Lewars, a neighbour's pretty daughter, who helped to minister to the
dying poet--an innocent type of much that had been the reverse of
innocent in his life--a characteristic attendant enough. Not as yet had
the faintest warning reached Herries in whose presence it was that,
after eight years of silent hatred, he stood. Something of awe, indeed,
held him, for he recognised by instinct the atmosphere of death. But he
walked up to the chair in total unsuspicion, mechanically holding out a
hand. And then a voice arrested him.
'Nay, not yet, sir!' said Burns. 'Wait! When once before you met me,
you held your hand behind you. It may be you'll put it back again
before we've done.'
Herries started violently, and his hand dropped to his side, for now he
saw and knew his enemy.
But this--this deathlike image--could it indeed be Robert Burns? The
last time that Herries had seen him--that only too memorable time--he
had been in the hey-day of his splendid manhood, flushed with wine and
bold with license, handsome as Bacchus, careless of mankind--balancing
on the corner of a table in unblushing drunkenness. Now, a spectre
faced the amazed intruder--hollow-eyed and fever-haunted, the bony frame
of a skeleton, the traces of death's clayey finger on cheek and temple,
lip and brow. Only the eyes glowed with their wonted and sombre fire;
they seemed to look Herries through and through--to read the secrets of
his heart. In spite of the old hatred, and battling with the old
contempt, there struggled into Herries's sensations an unwilling
reverence. All through what seemed to him the fantastic interview which
ensued he strove with bitterness to assert himself. But it was with the
curious and baffling consciousness that a greater than himself, albeit
stained with a thousand sins and follies, strove with him and held him
down.
*CHAPTER XLIV.*
'Will you not be seated, sir?' said Burns, pointing to the chair which
Jessie Lewars had vacated. Herries, with a gesture and an inclination,
intimated his wish to stand; and throughout the interview he continued
to do so at some little distance from the sick man, his head bent, his
eyes upon the ground, save when they were raised to meet the poet's dark
and penetrating gaze.
'Now, sir,' the Bard began, raising himself with difficulty in his
chair, 'have patience while you listen to me. You owe me the hearing
which the dying may exact from those they leave behind.'
'I will listen to you,' said Herries, shortly.
'Last night,' continued Burns; 'these two or three nights, indeed, I
have seen you pass my door, unwitting; for here I sit with a sick man's
look-out upon the world he must soon leave. I remembered you, and a bit
of the Devil's work I did when the wine was red and ginger hot in the
mouth came back to me, for it concerned your house. I have gossips in
the town--too many, perhaps--and I soon heard that the great Edinburgh
lawyer, Mr. Herries, was abiding at the "Globe," alone, but for his
servant. Now, why alone?' The questioner's dark eye rested upon
Herries's with a look half quizzical, half sombre.
'Where is man's God-given companion--where is the wife, sir?'
'I have no wife,' said Herries, sternly, most bitterly resenting the
allusion to his private matters--yet, somehow, held by the overpowering
personality of his interlocutor.
'What?' cried Burns. 'Then where is the lass that you loved--for you
did love her--the big, bonny body wi' the bunch o' curls? Well I mind
her, though she liked me little!'
'If you speak of Miss Graham,' said Herries, his lips hardly able to
form the name, 'I have never seen her or heard of her since the night I
took her from your house.'
'Man alive!' ejaculated the poet, staring at his guest in blank
astonishment. 'Is it possible? That there was a mischief brewing
through some trickery of that sour devil, Nicol, I knew--fu' though I
was, and roarin' fu' that night. But, as I live, I never thought but
that you and the lass would kiss and make it up or ever you got the
length of Princes Street!'
'Was I to take a sweetheart from your chamber?' said Herries, with a
sneer.
'But, surely,' cried Burns, 'surely you knew the lass was there against
her will? She had come on some cantrip of my Clarinda--well, I must
e'en be plain, your cousin, Mrs. Maclehose; we had some trifle of
dalliance in those days, and your girl was Cupid's messenger--just once
too often, it would seem.'
'But she as good as told me with her own lips,' said Herries, 'that the
disgrace of her situation was her own, and that she had deceived me....'
'Then she lied!' said Burns, energetically, 'and lied to save her
friend, who was indeed most particularly in terror that your honour's
self should scent her little game.... Listen, sir. I was never one to
tell when I had kissed, but I must e'en out with it now. Here's a grave
matter that needs more clearing even than I thought--and your own
relative's honour is surely as safe with you as with me. The little
lady thrives, I hear, on the fairest pinnacle of good fame, and you
would be the last to interrupt her prosperity. But in those merry days
she had a kindly eye for a poor Bard--and troth, so had the Bard for
her--and we had--well, sundry tender passages and letters, though all
within the strictest limits of Platonic friendship. And then there was
your bonny lass--may God forgive us for the use we put her innocence
to!--forever the go-between. Yet, sir, before real harm was done, I had
compounded with my conscience to break with my Clarinda once and
forever. Then came your ... Do you remember your letter?'
'I remember a letter,' said Herries, moodily, 'in which I forbade you my
cousin's house....'
'Ay!' cried Burns, 'and what right had you, or any fellow-creature, to
hector, catechise and insult me as did you in that letter? To a man of
my temper, 'twas intolerable, and every drop of black blood in my veins
rose at the injury. I had the creature Nicol at my elbow, and he made
me write some trash--I mind not what--to you. But the real mischief was
that your ill-judged and insolent order sent me, by provocation,
hot-foot to your cousin's--ay, by night, too--and we were alone.... I
outstayed--indeed, I did most damnably outstay, decorum's hour--and I
will not say what devil whispered in my ear ... for opportunity and the
fair one both were kind. Then there comes upon us, out of her first
sleep, the lassie Graham. Ecod! I see her yet--the round eyes of her,
like a bairn's, staring at me; the flounces of her night-rail, her bare
bit feet. Up she comes, and takes the woman from my very arms into her
own, as had she been an infant, showing me the door the while wi' the
gait o' a queen. 'Od, 'tis not often Robbie Burns has played so poor a
part in an affair of that kind! I e'en slunk out o' the house like a
whipped tyke wi' his tail atween his legs. And so the lass better'd
me--and maybe saved the honour of your house. And for all reward you
cast her off!' Herries had turned from white to red, and from red to
white again, during this recital. But now his eyes glittered with a
cold anger.
'You are utterly unjust as to my part in the affair,' he said
deliberately. 'Your own letter, which you slur over so easily, was a
tissue of falsehood--if what you now tell me be true--and it was written
with intent to mislead me. Every word and every act of my cousin's was
studied to the same end. I was hedged in with lies. Of those who
wronged Miss Graham, I certainly was not the guilty one; I utterly deny
it. I was the catspaw of others infinitely unscrupulous. If I did Miss
Graham an injustice, I deeply deplore it; but I was not responsible.'
Burns eyed the speaker long and curiously--ironically, indeed.
'The legal mind, I see, sir, lights on the cold justice of the case at
once, and banishes emotion and romance,' he said. 'Let me tell you,
here and now, how I repent my part in the unlucky business. The letter
I sent you was Nicol's, in truth, and not mine. In a sober mood I'd not
have lent myself to such a trick; but I was drunk, and there was my
disgrace. I ask your pardon, as one erring human being asks pardon of
another, who, in his turn, must be a supplicant for grace before the
Throne of God.... Or is Mr. Herries, indeed, above his fellows, and in
no need of pity and forgiveness from above?' Herries frowned--the
annoyed frown of a man to whom heroics are distasteful.
'It is a Christian duty to forgive,' he said coldly. 'Your injury to me
I do forgive, but your injury to another was far deeper, and confession
and repentance, sir, have come a little late.'
'But not too late for reparation!' cried the poet, eagerly. 'Does your
heart not warm again to that wronged lassie? 'Od, my own blood, that
runs like ice in these congealing veins, leaps at the thought of her! I
cannot get to her--I'll never see her face again--for earth will be upon
these eyes, and the great darkness.... But I will bless her with the
blessing of the dying--'tis all I have.... But you, sir--you--you have
a horse, you've health and strength and time--a heart, I'd hope ...
surely you will go to her--fly to her--losing not a day!'
'After a few hours' reflection,' said Herries, with a consciously
exaggerated coldness, 'I shall be the better judge of how to act. In
the meantime, although I do not doubt your statement, I should like
proof positive that your memory does not play you false.'
'Most noble judge!' said Burns, with bitter irony, 'it shall be yours!
The sacred pages of my Clarinda's letters will be proof-positive enough
in all conscience, and you shall see them. They are safe with you.
I'll have the packet searched for, and to-morrow, if you will trouble to
call, it shall be delivered to your hands.'
'To-morrow,' said Herries, 'I shall be absent at B---- on the Duke's
business, and perhaps for two days; but on my return I will do myself
the honour to call.'
'I may not be here,' said Burns, significantly. 'But, no matter, the
letters will be ready.' He paused. The two men looked at each other in
silence--antipathetic to the last--across a gulf of mutual
misunderstanding, that not years of speech or explanation could have
bridged over. The ardent and impulsive temperament of Burns might
indeed have leapt the chasm, and he longed even now for a reconciliation
with the man he had wronged--a reconciliation with warm, heartfelt
words, and a clasp of the hand. But to Herries, hedged about with the
prejudices of a lifetime--to Herries, just, but cold--even the semblance
of reconciliation was impossible. It was Burns who spoke next, in a
gentler voice, and with a kindly shrewdness in his eyes.
'How well it would be, sir,' he said, 'could nature sometimes mix her
handiwork! Had I, now, some of your excellent qualities of judgment and
coolness, how much more wisely should I have waged the war of life! And
you, methinks, might be a little better for a few drops of the hot blood
that has been the plague of me all my days. But we are as God made us,
and the Devil spoiled us, and to make or mar is seemingly little in our
own power.' The poet's voice had become fainter, and the excitement
which had upheld him throughout the interview began to wane. His
excessive weakness became apparent, as he leaned back against the
pillows, with closing eyes. Herries came nearer to him for the first
time.
'You have stretched a great point for me, Mr. Burns,' he said, 'in that
you have undertaken this interview when you were so little able to bear
the strain. I admire your fortitude, and I beg to thank you for the
unselfish effort. I see how it has worn you out, and I will leave you
now, and call your nurse.' The poet opened his eyes, and fixed them on
the younger man with an indescribably yearning look.
'I would do better now,' he said, 'to pray than to preach! There is one
prayer for us all, Mr. Herries--for you--for me: "_Forgive us our debts
as we forgive our debtors!_"'
'Amen!' said Herries, with the first ring of emotion in his voice.
Then, with a deep inclination, he silently left the room.
*CHAPTER XLV.*
It took Herries three full days to accomplish the business of which he
had spoken to the poet. When he returned to Dumfries, the town was
ringing with the death of Burns. A suppressed excitement seemed to
pervade the streets; men spoke in muffled voices, awe-stricken, of the
great spirit fled--and women cried to think of the destitute young
widow, with her flock of orphans, who must so soon, in double peril, and
under the very shadow of death, give to the world the poet's posthumous
child.
Herries felt a great delicacy in presenting himself at the house of
mourning, and yet time pressed, and the possession of the letters was of
vital importance to him. He waited one day, and then, on the morning of
his departure, directed his steps to the Wee Vennel. This time the door
was opened to him by Jessie Lewars, her pretty face swollen and
discoloured by tears.
'I was directed by--by the late Mr. Burns to call here for a packet of
letters,' said Herries, with respectful hesitancy.
'We were bidden to expect you, sir,' answered the girl, and then she
added that invitation which, under the circumstances, among the
peasantry of Scotland, is never withheld and never refused: 'Will you be
pleased to come up the stair and view the corpse, sir?' Herries
followed her upstairs, but she did not enter the room with him. He was
left to do that alone.
It was the same room in which he had spoken with the poet, but now swept
and garnished, and with a Puritan simplicity and dignity in its poor
belongings that went strangely to the heart. The widow rose from her
seat at the bed's head. Herries had seen her before, but only now
realised that this must be Jean Armour. With a singularly unaffected
gesture of restrained and decent sorrow, she removed, in silence, the
fair white linen kerchief that covered the face of her dead. Herries,
with folded arms, and with a singular mixture of emotions, looked long
upon the splendid mask. As in life, the dark hair swept the pallid
brow, and though the glory of those eyes was quenched under the sealed
lids that would lift no more, there was, in the fixed and immutable
gravity of the lifeless face, a language beyond all looks, beyond all
uttered speech: that air of incommunicable knowledge which, in the Dead,
baffles the living with its eternal silence.
After a few minutes the widow, gently and reverently, covered the face
once more.
'It was to be,' she said simply, with the quiet fatalism of her class.
She turned and took from the table a packet of letters, and handed them
to Herries without a word. He noted the quivering of her bloodless lip,
but noted, too, the mild placidity of her wise, broad brow. Without
some such element of enduring calm, never, surely, could Jean Armour
have met the complicated trials of her life.
Herries took the letters from her with an almost humble reverence, and,
strangely subdued in spirit, left the house and journeyed from the town.
* * * * *