he was still undecided as to the precise direction he must take.
Northwards he must go, but whether straight to Edinburgh, or, with a
divergence to the west which would lead him to the home of the woman he
had once loved, he could not, deeply though he hated indecision, make up
his mind. A singular mood of coldness and hesitancy was upon him, and
he could not shake it off. Yet it would be wrong to judge Herries, even
now, as a man without feelings; he had feelings, but naturally so deeply
hid, and, of late years, so sternly repressed, so purposely held down,
that he began to doubt their existence in himself. Where was the
enthusiasm, the chivalrous ardour that should have urged him on an
errand like this: that errand--a privilege, surely, to any generous
man--of reparation to a noble and innocent woman for a cruel wrong?
This was his errand now, but it left him cold. No gush of revived
passion stirred his heart; he seemed to himself to have become old and
pulseless, and, unconsciously, he pictured Alison the same--old too,
past feeling. Was she alive or dead? He did not know. Married,
perhaps? It might well be, and with another man's children at her knee.
She had acted nobly, bravely, in that miserable episode of the past.
Well--perhaps--and yet Herries was not even in sympathy with the note of
sacrifice in her act. It angered him rather--the injustice, the cruelty
of it, and the total unworthiness, in his view, of her for whom the
sacrifice had been made. Alison had held Nancy's honour as dearer than
his--Herries's--happiness, and had sacrificed him, as well as herself,
to her ideas of loyalty to a friend. He doubted whether she had done
well: to his present cold mood there seemed a something less noble than
quixotism in this--a touch of womanish hysterics. His own part in the
affair he felt must be a source of bitterness to him that could never
die; yet he would not allow that there could be any element in it
whatsoever of remorse. His had been the dupe's part, and, to a man of
Herries's proud temper, that was a galling thought, however it might
lessen his responsibility. The woman in whom he had believed had been
made to appear to him as unworthy of belief--by evidences so strong that
to doubt them must have been to doubt the testimony of his senses and
his sanity. He had cast her off, but it had not been without question.
He had been stern, perhaps--but, in his opinion, it behoved men to be
stern where honour was concerned. He had been tricked, and though it was
not Alison who tricked him, yet she had connived at the trickery, and
stood by and seen him made a fool of. As he went on his way, riding
slowly, and resting often, he would take out and read those letters
which had been given up to him--those fevered letters of
'Clarinda'--which certainly cleared Alison of every kind of blame, save
that of a too yielding good-nature to her unscrupulous friend. How they
enraged him, as he read--just as their writer used to do in days gone
by--with what an impotent rage against this trivial feminine thing that
he despised, and yet that had had power enough almost to ruin his life!
Yet the letters brought decision, for they shaped his course, which now
definitely took the westward route, towards the Perthshire highlands.
All this time, as he pondered, he had been riding through the classic
country--sacred even then, as it is still, to the genius and the name of
Burns. He had taken his way along the broad and river-haunted valley of
the Nith; he had threaded the wild and hilly country of the Cumnocks; he
had rested at Mauchline, and might have seen, without knowing it,
Mossgiel. All around him, rich and fair, yellow now to its abundant
harvests, spread the country that had nursed the peasant poet to his
Titanic manhood--noble valley--rolling river--fertile plain. The lowly
farms were eloquent of him; each humble implement of toil--the plough,
the harrow and the reaper's hook--spoke of the hardy labours of his
strenuous youth. The woods whispered of him; the summer evening
breathed the legend of his first idyllic love--seemed instinct with the
young undoing of Jean Armour, with the kiss, the jest, the gaiety of
rustic courtship. At inn and toll, at kirk and market--yet rang the
echoes of his splendid joviality, and by haunted kirkyard wall, and
clattering arch and hoary brig, it seemed as though you yet might hear
the thundering hoofs of flying Tam o' Shanter's auld mare Maggie. One
name only seemed ever on the lips of men and women--and Herries heard
it, as it seemed to him, wherever he rode, wherever he rested, wherever
he spoke, or ate or slept upon that memorable journey. Strange irony of
fate that should lead him--the instinctive enemy of the dead
poet--antipathetic to him in every thought and impulse and idea--to
haunt these scenes. Stranger still that he should come to them fresh
from the last great scene of all--the closing scene in that tremendous
tragedy of a poet's life. Even Herries--unimaginative, unsympathetic,
cold--felt the coincidence, and felt with it some singular, reluctant,
vague understanding of the spirit that had passed away, even though his
own wrongs, and the deeper wrongs of another, from the dead man's very
hand, cried out for their too-long-delayed redress.
In this unwonted and unwelcome mingling of moods, he took his way,
riding up the western coasts from Ayr, crossing the Clyde near Glasgow,
striking inland to the mountain land up by Loch Lomond, through the
exquisite wild Highland country of Glen Falloch; and so, by pass and
glen, and wood and water, fertile strath and harvest fields, down to the
lowlands again, and the tamer country of the Ochills. One summer night
found him, at length, at the last gate of the Highlands, the little town
of C----, and he knew that he rested but two miles from Alison's home,
if indeed Alison were still Alison Graham and had a home at The Mains.
*CHAPTER XLVI.*
Away down at The Mains it was high summer, and the low-lying,
wood-encircled old white house lay brooding in the August heat. The
bees hummed in the lime tree, and in the spruce woods the pigeons
crooned all day, but the rooks in the plane trees kept their cawing till
the evening.
But in these days there were great changes at The Mains; not only those
deliberate changes, due to the slow workings of nature, which are common
to the obscure places of the world, but the more violent ones which come
of the striving and the energy of man, or rather woman. In the first
place, Mrs. Graham, that tremendous creature, had married all her
daughters, every one, save, indeed, the predestined old maid of the
family, who, though she had had (as her mother frequently reminded her)
the best chances of them all, in an Edinburgh season, was mateless
still. By remorseless energy, by ceaseless harping on the subject, had
this stringent mother goaded six daughters into matrimony against
tremendous odds. One, as we know, had 'taken' Mr. Cheape; two had
married ministers--albeit one had been a 'wanter,' i.e., a widower, with
a numerous infant family. Another had captured a soldier lad, a
subaltern in a marching regiment, quartered, during some manoeuvres of
the County Militia, at the town of C----. Yet another had espoused a
surgeon, while one, alas! the pretty Sally, barely at sixteen, had run
away with a handsome shepherd off her father's farm. Hot was the hue
and cry after the misguided lassie; her father spurred to overtake the
couple and prevent the union, but returned crestfallen--thankful,
eventually, to have been shown the marriage lines. This episode was no
great feather in the maternal cap, and poor Sally's name was
conspicuously absent from the fly-leaf of the family Bible. The
mistress of The Mains now rested from her match-making labours, and
devoted, henceforth, all her energies to the insane indulgence of her
only son--now a pampered and disagreeable boy of ten.
In these times would Mrs. Graham publicly announce among her neighbours
that she did not intend to marry off her daughter Alison. Disgraceful
though it was to have a girl left on your hands, yet one unmarried
daughter was not unuseful. Jacky would need a housekeeper until he
married. After that great event, Alison's future might be nebulous, but
in no case was it a matter of very great importance.
In the meantime, useful occupation was not lacking to Miss Graham of The
Mains. In these changed days, she had, besides her household work and
poultry-keeping, certain grave and tender duties which kept her much
confined to the house, even in this lovely summer time. It was to get a
few moments' respite from these, and a mouthful of fresh air, that she
would steal out, bare-headed, on the drowsy afternoons, and wander in
the garden. One day (it was, indeed, the day after Herries's arrival in
the country), she did this, having in charge, however, her brother. The
mistress of The Mains was absent on a drive to visit a distant
neighbour, and in her absence the precious heir was never trusted a
moment by himself.
Jacky wished to go and climb upon a wall which was being built round the
old, and hitherto only hedged, garden. So far but a few yards had been
completed--the broad parapet offering a tempting promenade for youthful
agility. It was a forbidden joy, but such things, to the spoilt child,
are ever only nominally forbidden, and Alison, by sage experience, was
aware that protest would be only waste of time. Jacky, therefore,
pranced upon the wall, deftly cracking a huge carter's whip--his latest
acquisition, which he had already made a terror to every man and woman
at The Mains. He was now a fat, overgrown and hearty boy, with long,
fair, effeminate ringlets, which a fond maternal hand could not bring
itself to shear, and which assorted ill enough with the sturdy and
thick-set appearance of the youthful heir.
For a little while he strutted all content, and Alison stepped about the
sweet old garden in the sun, and picked herself a little bunch of white
clove pinks, and stuck them in her dress. But her moments of respite
were soon numbered.
'Come now, Jacky,' she called, going to the wall's foot; 'come down like
a good boy! You know I must go in to father.'
'I'm no comin',' said Jacky, with the serene finality of the spoilt
child.
'Ah--but you must,' pleaded his sister, 'for mother would never have you
left upon the dyke your lone, and father wants me.' But Jacky paid no
heed.
'I'll have to come and pull you down,' said Alison, rashly going nearer.
'Ye'll no!' said Jacky, with a deft swirl of his whip. It cracked like a
pistol shot on the silent summer air, and the tip of the lash caught
Alison on the ear, so that she clapped her hand to the place with a
little cry of pain.
'Ah, Jacky,' she cried, 'you've hurt me now.' But Jacky--a fiendish,
little, spoilt wretch--only laughed.
Nemesis, however, hovered behind him, for there had been an unsuspected
witness to the scene. A gentleman on horseback had come down the road
which passed close to the new wall, and, attracted by the repeated
cracking of a whip, had paused. Finally he had dismounted, tied his
horse to a gate-post, and, standing a little way off from the end of the
unfinished dyke, could see and hear what happened both above and below.
While Alison, the tears of her smart in her eyes, still expostulated
vainly with her brother, she was suddenly electrified to perceive his
ankles clasped by two hands from the other side of the wall. With a
sharp howl of terror, the heir of all the Grahams disappeared abruptly
from his perch. Alison ran round the dyke, and lo! with the roaring
Jacky struggling in his arms, there was Archibald Herries, or his ghost.
Alison stopped dead, and the two, with eight years between them of pain,
and parting, and estrangement, stood staring at each other--so strange
is human life--upon the verge of laughter. Herries released the boy,
who ran yelling to the house, and then, flushed and awkward, he stood
before Alison.
'I--I am come to The Mains, you see,' he stammered, not brilliantly, it
must be confessed.
'I see, sir,' said Alison, a little giddily. (How sweet, how
strong--too strong--the pinks smelt in her dress!) 'But you are like to
have an odd welcome,' she went on, in a queer, steady voice, and yet
with a little uncertain laugh, 'if you begin like this, by beating
Jacky. 'Tis a providence has sent my mother from home this day, or you
would be like to get into her black books.'
The summer world, the trees, the sky were reeling round her, but she
kept her head, better, indeed, than did the man. He, dumb, stood
looking at her, while the world, his world, changed round him, like the
world of dreams. What had he expected to see?--a faded woman past her
prime? Alison was twenty-eight now, but at twenty-eight, young women
living quiet country lives are neither old nor faded as a common rule.
She was a girl yet, the flush of summer on her cheeks, not the tendril
of a curl changed; bewitching womanliness was in the sweet curves of her
young body beneath the cotton gown. Her eyes seemed larger than of
yore, perhaps because the face had fined away a little from mere girlish
chubbiness to slightly hollower lines of cheek and chin. Her soft,
broad forehead knit itself a little. Herries felt his heart go from
him, and his cool head swam. He tried to keep command of himself, but
himself--the self of all these barren years--was slipping from him even
now.
'Can I--can I have a few words with you alone?' he asked humbly.
'Surely, sir,' said Alison. 'But I cannot spare you many minutes, for I
am wanted.' A look of pain, of harassed anxiety, came into her eyes,
which should have been an omen. But Herries did not see it. They began
to walk in the garden, on a grass path between yew hedges.
'Have you seen Nancy lately, and is she well?' asked Alison, breaking
the silence.
'I never see her,' said Herries, shortly. 'Have you dropped all
knowledge of her too?'
'At first we wrote a little,' said Alison, quietly, 'but I am no great
hand at letters, sir, and so--and so we grew apart.'
'That's well,' said Herries, abruptly. He chafed at this dull talk,
walking at Alison's side, but what to say, where to begin? He stole a
look at her. 'Alison,' he cried suddenly, 'your ear hurts. That little
monster cut it with the lash; it bleeds.'
'Does it?' said Alison, faintly, putting up her hand.
'Wait--here!' said Herries, eagerly. 'I have a soft silk kerchief.' He
noted, with a kind of anguish, the smudge of blood upon a little curl,
and yet thought himself cool enough to wipe it away unmoved. But the
touch, the contact, the terrible sweetness of approach were all too
much. The pent-up tenderness of years would be denied no longer--his
empty arms rebelled against their emptiness.
'Ally!' he cried. 'Oh! Ally--oh, my soul!'
For, indeed, it did seem as though, after all these years of deathly
trance, his soul had come back to him.
*CHAPTER XLVII.*
And now Herries, who had found an advocate, became his own accuser.
'That you can forgive me this long and cruel silence is impossible,'
said the man who had hitherto held himself so proudly blameless.
'Nay, there's nothing to forgive in you,' said the fond woman, who held
him blameless still. 'Do you think I did not know you?' she went on
softly. 'I knew that you, being you, must have acted as you did. And I
said to myself I would abide by your action, whatever it was, for I knew
it would be just!'
'If it was not my action that was sorely wrong,' said Herries, in his
new contrition, 'then it was something deeper. 'Twas my heart and
nature that erred; to doubt yon was a cold-hearted, an abominable
crime!' But Alison only smiled.
'If you had erred,' she said, 'it might have been easier for me, for
then I might have found some comfort in thinking you unworthy. But no,
I would not, for all the world, have had it so! I'd rather have borne
the hardness of our parting than that!'
'Was it--was it so very hard--to you?' whispered Herries.
'Is it hard when the nest and the young ones are torn from the bird, do
you think?' said Alison. 'If that is hard, my suffering was like it;
for all that I had went from me when I went from you!' Herries sighed,
and memory tormented him. He heard the plashing rain upon the
pavement--the rain of that night of parting; he saw the white face that
Alison turned upon him from the window of the sedan as the chairmen
carried her away into the darkness.
'May God pardon me the hardness of my heart,' he said, raising the hat
from his head, 'for I'll never forgive myself as long as I live.'
They spoke of Robert Burns, and they spoke of Nancy, unravelling that
terrible entanglement of the past. Herries spoke with a new gentleness,
and Alison, as she heard him, pressed close to his side.
'You forgive them--you do forgive them--don't you, Archie?' she
whispered. 'For, you know, Nancy never dreamed how deeply she injured
us, and he--the man--knew not what he did. We cannot be happy if we
leave them unforgiven!' Herries did not answer, for his heart was big
within him, and in his ears was the sound of a voice, now stilled for
ever, pleading for that forgiveness which the sweet woman at his side
now urged upon him.
'"_Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors!_"' said he, at last,
in the same words, and they fell from him with a sigh.
'I must go now,' said Alison, at last, 'for I dare not linger. I have
stayed too long.'
'Nay, but I'll not let you, Alison,' said Herries, 'till it is promised
me that our parting is at an end, and that I can come and ask you of
your parents this very day. Why not?' Alison stood still and looked at
him, and in her eyes was a something akin to that compassion with which
you will see a mother look at her careless and unconscious child.
'Nay, Archie,' she said faintly. 'I had been thinking that you knew....
But that's all gone and done with now. I have no freedom to go with any
man. I cannot leave my home.'
'But, by the God that is above us, you shall--and with me!' said
Herries, violently. 'I will permit no second sacrifice of our love and
life.'
'Come with me--home, Archie,' said Alison, gently, 'and I'll show you
what I cannot tell you.' In a brooding silence they went to unloose
Herries's horse, which had pawed the ground beneath him to a pulp. A
lad took it from them as they went towards the house. 'I am taking you
to my father's room,' said Alison, in a low voice. She led him down the
dark narrow passage to the library.
'Here are two steps in the dark--take care,' she whispered, and as he
stumbled he felt her guiding hand come out to him. She opened the
library door, and in the warm light of the summer evening that came in
through the little deep-set windows, Herries saw the laird of The Mains.
Alas! for the four-bottle man--our jovial ancestor of a drinking age!
His life may have been a merry one, but it was generally short, and
often before middle age the gout would get him at his vitals, or deathly
paralysis lay him by the heels. It was the latter vengeance that had
overtaken the laird of The Mains--pinning him helpless, and almost
speechless, to his great lug-chair by the fire for which he shivered
even in the hottest day. There he sat, huddled in gown and slippers,
the wreck of a man at fifty-six, and behind him, rudely carved upon the
green stone mantel, Herries read the doleful legend, which seemed the
text of a wordless but expressive sermon:
_'In human life there's nothing steadfast stands,_
_Youth, Glorie, Riches fades. Death's sure at hand.'_
Hardly anything of the sick man could move but his eyes, and these
turned upon his daughter as she entered with a dog-like look of
expectation, while he set up a painful, inarticulate cry for water--for
he was tormented by an insatiable and raging thirst.
''Tis ever so, if I leave him for but half-an-hour,' said Alison, in a
low voice. 'No one comes to him; they let his cup be empty and his fire
go out. Oh, I've been cruel to leave him so long,' she cried, with a
pang of remorse. She held the cup to his lips, and in her strong young
arms raised the supine and helpless form against the pillows. Herries,
inexpressibly shocked, with a sense of foreboding against which he
vainly strove, watched her.
'But, Alison!' he whispered, passionately, 'this--this is your mother's
duty. She's bound to it by every law of marriage--by every impulse of
humanity.'
'You do not know my mother, sir,' said Alison, quietly; 'God forgive me
for these unnatural words against her that bore me. But my mother has
her health, and is, besides, of an impatient nature, and cannot
understand that others should be sick and feeble.... I'll say no more.'
They went together to the far end of the low, long room, which was now
getting dark.
'But this is monstrous!' said Herries, vehemently, 'a second
sacrifice--I repeat it! You sacrificed me once to Nancy--and now you
would sacrifice me to another. You cannot love me!'
'I love you,' said Alison, intently, 'I love you better than all the
world--better than my poor father. But, or ever I saw your face,
Archie, I knew his, and he has been a good father to me. God would
surely desert me if, knowing what I do of things at home, I were to
leave him in his helplessness. Archie, you'll not bring me to tempt
God's anger?' It was almost a cry, but Herries would not hear the
justice in it.
'Then I go,' he said, sore and angry, 'I go, uncomforted and alone.'
But Alison clung to him with a sob.
'Oh, no--no--no!' she whispered, 'don't leave me, Archie--oh, not yet!
I've been so long alone--so long--and never a sight of your face, and
sometimes I would be nearly mad to think I might forget it. But no--I
have remembered every line.'
Herries held his breath, and in the poignant sacredness of the moment
his heart stood still. For never had Alison's arms held him as they did
just now, or her eyes read his face; and he felt that woman's passion,
unashamed, had taken the place of a girl's timid love. Her fingers
touched his hair, and yet, somehow, with all its passion, it was a touch
that might have been his mother's.
'You're gotten so grey, Archie,' she said, with a little tender laugh.
'You'll scarcely need the powder now!'
But Herries put her from him, almost roughly, with an oath.
'I can't bear it, Ally,' he said. 'If I must go, let me go now. I must
have all or nothing.'
He took his riding-whip from the table where he had laid it, and turned
and went without a word.
*CHAPTER XLVIII.*
That night did a stranger cause much commotion in the streets of C----by
rampaging (as the inhabitants expressed it) up and down, demanding at
every turn the surgeon who waited upon Mr. Graham of The Mains. It was
Herries who pursued this curious quest, and the placid citizens judged
him demented, as, indeed, but a few hours since, he would have judged
himself. He traced the personage whom he sought to his own dwelling,
where he found him, resting after the labours of the day, over a
comfortable and steaming glass of toddy. Herries entered the room,
booted and spurred as he was, and rang a guinea on the doctor's table
with much the air of holding a pistol to his ear.
'I am given to understand,' said he, 'that you attend the laird of The
Mains. Oblige me by telling me in confidence how long, in your opinion,
it is probable that Mr. Graham has to live?' The astonished AEsculapius
looked up, open-mouthed, shoving his spectacles from his nose to his
bald forehead.
'God bless me!' he exclaimed. 'And who are you that put this most
extraordinary question? It is outrageous!'
'I have paid good money for your opinion, like any other man--and should
get it, I presume,' said Herries, sulkily.
'Not at all, not at all, sir!' said the doctor, swelling with
professional offence. 'I never heard of such bold impudence!' He was,
in the meantime, looking Herries up and down, and perceiving a
gentlemanly man, well dressed and with a pale, grave face, made up his
mind that he was neither a man in liquor nor a madman, but some person
of consideration.
'If,' he said at last, 'you will give me satisfactory reasons for your
extraordinary question, I may see whether I can answer it with decorum
and with due attention to professional etiquette. I am too old a bird
not to know that there are often good reasons for the strangest
actions.' Herries was silent. He had intended no confidences; an
impulse, very unlike him, had driven him to this crude method of trying
to find out how long a time, Laban-like, he must yet serve for Alison.
There was something kindly in the old doctor's weather-worn, sagacious
countenance.
'I have a reason,' Herries said, suddenly determined to be frank. 'I am
a suitor for the hand of Miss Graham, and she will not marry in her
father's lifetime.'
'Oh--ho! sets the wind in that airt?' said the doctor, much more
genially. 'Come, sit down, man, and let us talk it over. And so you
are a friend of Miss Alison's? So am I--in troth, her earliest! And
she will not leave her father for you? Well, I daresay not, I daresay
not--a good lass! But the mother, let me tell you, stands in your gait
fully more than the laird. She'll not do wanting Alison, and so she
tells the world. A tremendous woman, sir, and set on her own ways.
You'll not get Alison from her.'
'I'll take her!' said Herries, with a short laugh.
'A bold man!' said the doctor. 'Well, rather you than me to meddle with
the mistress of The Mains! As to the laird, it goes against the grain
with me to give his death-warrant. Many's the bottle I've cracked with
him, honest man, sitting in the parlour at The Mains yonder--the
mistress brought to bed upstairs--and waiting for they lasses of his to
come into the world. But we must all die!' He paused, and then went on
gravely, 'I cannot tell you how long you may have to wait. It might be
a month, it might be a year, it might be ten. Some, in paralysis, die
soon. Some linger in a death in life like his for half a lifetime. The
Graham stock is tough, uncommonly so; but my old friend is in a bad
case--the Lord send him rest!--and I do not think he'll live the year.'
The speaker eyed Herries curiously. 'Does that content you?' he asked,
with a twinkling eye.
'God forgive me for a cold-blooded questioner in this!' said Herries,
really vexed and sorely ashamed. 'But I am clean distraught, I think!
This young lady and I were contracted eight years since, but mischief
came between us and we parted. And now we meet only to part again, this
feeble life of a man almost dead between us. Am I excused in your eyes,
sir?'