one, through which a ray of light struggled to illuminate merely a
part of the room, the party beheld a sight which in all likelihood
would retain a vividness in their memories after all other images of
earthly things had passed away. Right in the middle of the partial
light admitted by the solitary window lay the bodies of two persons--a
man and a woman. The latter had on her a yellow morning gown trimmed
with green. One slipper was on, the other off; her head, which was
uncovered, was surmounted by the high toupee of the times, which
consisted of the collected hair brushed up and supported by a concealed
cushion. The man had on a morning dress, with a round felt hat, which
still retained its place on his head. There was no corruption in the
bodies of that kind called moist. They were nearly shrivelled, but that
to an extent which reduced them to little other than skeletons covered
with a brown skin--a state of the bodies which probably resulted
from the dry air of the wareroom, heated as it was by a smithy being
immediately below it, the smoke of which was conveyed by a flue up the
side of the tenement. The two bodies lay clasped in each other’s arms,
the faces were so close that the noses almost met; the eyes were open,
and though the balls were shrunk so much that they could not be seen,
the lids, which had shrunk also, were considerably apart. These were
the bodies of Julia Halliday and Archibald Blair.
There was not a word spoken by the searchers. Their eyes told them all
that was necessary to convince them of the identity of those who lay
before them. Nor, when Halliday took up a paper which lay at the head
of Blair, did he think it necessary to make any observation of surprise
at what was in keeping with what they saw.
“Oh, read,” said Mrs Blair, as she gasped in the midst of her agony.
Halliday, holding up the paper so as to receive the light, read as
follows:--
“Whoever you may be, man or woman, who first discovers the bodies of
me and her who lies by my side will please, as he or she hopes for
mercy, deliver this paper either to Mr Patrick Halliday of Peddie’s
Land, or Mrs Archibald Blair in Writers’ Court, that they may take
the means of getting us decently interred. Julia Halliday and I,
Archibald Blair, met and looked and loved. These few words contain
the secret of our misfortune, and must be the excuse of our crime
in taking away our lives. Our love was too strong to be quelled by
resolution, too sacred to be corrupted by coarse enjoyment of the
senses, too hopeless to be borne amidst the impediments of our mutual
obligations to our spouses. We felt and believed that it was only
our mortal bodies that belonged to our partners, our spirits were
ours and ours alone by that decree which made the soul, with its
sympathies and its elections, before ever the world was, or marriage,
which is only a convention of man’s making. We loved, we sinned not,
yet we were unhappy, because we could not fulfil the obligations of
affection to those we had sworn at the altar to love and honour.
Often have we torn ourselves from each other with vows on our lips
of mutual avoidance, but these efforts were vain. We could not live
estranged, and we flew again to each other’s arms, again to vow,
again to meet, again to be blessed, again to be tortured. This life
was unendurable; and, left to the alternative of parting or dying,
we selected the latter. The poison was bought by me in two separate
vials. As I write, Julia holds hers in her hands, and smiles as she
is about to swallow the drug. We have resolved to lie down face to
face, so as to be able to look into each other’s eyes and watch
jealously Death as he drags us slowly from each other. I have now
swallowed my draft, smiling the while in Julia’s face. She does the
same. The pen trembles in my hand. Farewell, my wife: Julia mutters,
‘Farewell, my husband.’ Against neither have we ever sinned.
“ARCHIBALD BLAIR.”
[Illustration]
The Story of Mary Brown.
If the reader of what I am going to relate for his or her edification,
or for perhaps a greater luxury, viz., wonder, should be so
unreasonable as to ask for my authority, I shall be tempted, because
a little piqued, to say that no one should be too particular about
the source of pleasure, inasmuch as, if you will enjoy nothing but
what you can prove to be a reality, you will, under good philosophical
leadership, have no great faith in the sun--a thing which you never
saw, the existence of which you are only assured of by a round
figure of light on the back of your eye, and which may be likened to
tradition; so all you have to do is to believe like a good Catholic,
and be contented, even though I begin so poorly as to try to interest
you in two very humble beings who have been dead for many years, and
whose lives were like a steeple without a bell in it, the intention
of which you cannot understand till your eye reaches the weathercock
upon the top, and then you wonder at so great an erection for so small
an object. The one bore the name of William Halket, a young man, who,
eight or nine years before he became of much interest either to himself
or any other body, was what in our day is called an Arab of the City--a
poor street boy, who didn’t know who his father was, though, as for his
mother, he knew her by a pretty sharp experience, insomuch as she took
from him every penny he made by holding horses, and gave him more cuffs
than cakes in return. But Bill got out of this bondage by the mere
chance of having been taken a fancy to by Mr Peter Ramsay, innkeeper
and stabler, in St Mary’s Wynd, (an ancestor, we suspect, of the
Ramsays of Barnton,) who thought he saw in the City Arab that love of
horse-flesh which belongs to the Bedouin, and who accordingly elevated
him to the position of a stable-boy, with board and as many shillings a
week as there are days in that subdivision of time.
Nor did William Halket--to whom for his merits we accord the full
Christian name--do any discredit to the perspicacity of his master,
if it was not that he rather exceeded the hopes of his benefactor,
for he was attentive to the horses, civil to the farmers, and handy
at anything that came in his way. Then, to render the connexion
reciprocal, William was gratefully alive to the conviction that if he
had not been, as it were, taken from the street, the street might have
been taken from him, by his being locked up some day in the Heart of
Midlothian. So things went on in St Mary’s Wynd for five or six years,
and might have gone on for twice that period, had it not been that at
a certain hour of a certain day William fell in love with a certain
Mary Brown, who had come on that very day to be an under-housemaid in
the inn; and strange enough, it was a case of “love at first sight,”
the more by token that it took effect the moment that Mary entered the
stable with a glass of whisky in her hand sent to him by Mrs Ramsay. No
doubt it is seldom that a fine blooming young girl, with very pretty
brown hair and very blue eyes, appears to a young man with such a
recommendation in her hand, but we are free to say that the whisky had
nothing to do with an effect which is well known to be the pure result
of the physical attributes of the individual. Nay, our statement might
have been proved by the counterpart effect produced upon Mary herself,
for she was struck by William at the same moment when she handed him
the glass; and we are not to assume that the giving of a pleasant boon
is always attended with the same effect as the receiving of it.
But, as our story requires, it is the love itself between these two
young persons whose fates were so remarkable we have to do with--not
the causes, which are a mystery in all cases. Sure it is, humble in
position as they were, they could love as strongly, as fervently,
perhaps as ecstatically, as great people--nay, probably more so,
for education has a greater chance of moderating the passion than
increasing it; and so, notwithstanding of what Plutarch says of
the awfully consuming love between Phrygius and Picrea, and also
what Shakespeare has sung or said about a certain Romeo and a lady
called Juliet, we are certain that the affection between these grand
personages was not _more_ genuine, tender, and true than that which
bound the simple and unsophisticated hearts of Will Halket and Mary
Brown. But at best we merely play on the surface of a deep subject when
we try with a pen to describe feelings, and especially the feelings
of love. We doubt, if even the said pen were plucked from Cupid’s
wing, it would help us much. We are at best only left to a choice of
expressions, and perhaps the strongest we could use are those which
have already been used a thousand times--the two were all the world
to each other, the world outside nothing at all to them; so that
they could have been as happy on the top of Mount Ararat, or on the
island of Juan Fernandez, provided they should be always in each
other’s company, as they were in St Mary’s Wynd. And as for whispered
protestations and chaste kisses--for really their love had a touch of
romance about it you could hardly have expected, but which yet kept
it pure, if not in some degree elevated above the loves of common
people--these were repeated so often about the quiet parts of Arthur’s
Seat and the Queen’s Park, and the fields about the Dumbiedykes and
Duddingstone Loch, that they were the very moral aliments on which
they lived. In short, to Mary Brown the great Duke of Buccleuch was as
nothing compared to Willie Halket, and to Willie Halket the beautiful
Duchess of Grammont would have been as nothing compared to simple Mary
Brown. All which is very amiable and very necessary, for if it had been
so ordained that people should feel the exquisite sensations of love
in proportion as they were beautiful, or rich, or endowed with talent,
(according to a standard,) our world would have been even more queer
than that kingdom described by Gulliver, where the ugliest individual
is made king or queen.
Things continued in this very comfortable state at the old inn in
St Mary’s Wynd for about a year, and it had come to enter into the
contemplation of Will that upon getting an increase of his wages
he would marry Mary and send her to live with her mother, a poor
hard-working washerwoman, in Big Lochend Close; whereunto Mary was
so much inclined, that she looked forward to the day as the one that
promised to be the happiest that she had yet seen, or would ever see.
But, as an ancient saying runs, the good hour is in no man’s choice;
and about this time it so happened that Mr Peter Ramsay, having had a
commission from an old city man, a Mr Dreghorn, located as a planter
in Virginia, to send him out a number of Scottish horses, suggested
to William that he would do well to act as supercargo and groom. Mr
Dreghorn had offered to pay a good sum to the man who should bring them
out safe, besides paying his passage over and home. And Mr Ramsay would
be ready to receive Will into his old place again on his return. As for
Mary, with regard to whom the master knew his man’s intentions, she
would remain where she was, safe from all temptation, and true to the
choice of her heart. This offer pleased William, because he saw that
he could make some money out of the adventure, whereby he would be the
better able to marry, and make a home for the object of his affections;
but he was by no means sure that Mary would consent; for women, by some
natural divining of the heart, look upon delays in affairs of love as
ominous and dangerous. And so it turned out that one Sabbath evening,
when they were seated beneath a tree in the King’s Park, and William
had cautiously introduced the subject to her, she was like other women.
“The bird that gets into the bush,” she said, as the tears fell upon
her cheeks, “sometimes forgets to come back to the cage again. I would
rather hae the lean lintie in the hand than the fat finch on the wand.”
“But you forget, Mary, love,” was the answer of Will, “that you can
feed the lean bird, but you can’t feed me. It is I who must support
you. It is to enable me to do that which induces me to go. I will come
with guineas in my pocket where there are now only pennies and placks,
and you know, Mary, the Scotch saying, ‘A heavy purse makes a light
heart.’”
“And an unsteady one,” rejoined Mary. “And you may bring something else
wi’ you besides the guineas; may be, a wife.”
“One of Mr Dreghorn’s black beauties,” said Will, laughing. “No, no,
Mary, I am too fond of the flaxen ringlets, the rosy cheeks, and the
blue eyes, and you know, Mary, you have all these, so you have me in
your power. But to calm your fears and stop your tears I’ll tell you
what I’ll do.”
“Stay at hame, Will, and we’ll live and dee thegither.”
“No,” replied Will, “but, like the genteel lover I have read of, I will
swear on your Bible that I will return to you within the year, and
marry you at the Tron Kirk, and throw my guineas into the lap of your
marriage-gown, and live with you until I die.”
For all which and some more we may draw upon our fancy, but certain
it is, as the strange story goes, that Will did actually then and
there--for Mary had been at the Tron Kirk and had her Bible in her
pocket, (an article the want of which is not well supplied by the
scent-bottle of our modern Marys,)--swear to do all he had said,
whereupon Mary was so far satisfied that she gave up murmuring--perhaps
no more than that. Certain also it is that before the month was done,
Will, with his living kicking charges, and after more of these said
tears from Mary than either of them had arithmetic enough to enable
them to count, embarked at Leith for Richmond, at which place the
sugar-planter had undertaken to meet him.
We need say nothing of the voyage across the Atlantic--somewhat arduous
at that period--nor need we pick up Will again till we find him in
Richmond with his horses all safe, and as fat and sleek as if they
had been fed by Neptune’s wife, and had drawn her across in place of
her own steeds. There he found directions waiting from Mr Dreghorn
to the effect that he was to proceed with the horses to Peach Grove,
his plantation, a place far into the heart of the country; but Will
was content, for had he not time and to spare within the year, and he
would see some more of the new world, which, so far as his experience
yet went, seemed to him to be a good place for a freeman to live in. So
off he went, putting up at inns by the way as well supplied with food
and fodder as Mr Peter Ramsay’s, in St Mary’s Wynd, and showing off his
nags to the planters, who wondered at their bone and muscle, the more
by reason they had never seen Scotch horses before. As he progressed,
the country seemed to Will more and more beautiful, and by the time
he reached Peach Grove he had come to the unpatriotic conclusion that
all it needed was Mary Brown, with her roses, and ringlets, and eyes,
passing like an angel--lovers will be poets--among these ebon beauties,
to make it the finest country in the world.
Nor when the Scotsman reached Peach Grove did the rosy side of matters
recede into the shady, for he was received in a great house by Mr
Dreghorn with so much kindness, that, if the horses rejoiced in maize
and oats, Will found himself, as the saying goes, in five-bladed
clover. But more awaited him, even thus much more, that the planter,
and his fine lady of a wife as well, urged him to remain on the
plantation, where he would be well paid and well fed; and when Will
pleaded his engagement to return to Scotland within the year, the
answer was ready that he might spend eight months in Virginia at least,
which would enable him to take home more money--an answer that seemed
so very reasonable, if not prudent, that “Sawny” saw the advantage
thereof and agreed. But we need hardly say that this was conceded upon
the condition made with himself, that he would write to Mary all the
particulars, and also upon the condition acceded to by Mr Dreghorn,
that he would take the charge of getting the letter sent to Scotland.
All which having been arranged, Mr Halket--for we cannot now continue
to take the liberty of calling him Will--was forthwith elevated to the
position of driving negroes in place of horses, an occupation which he
did not much relish, insomuch that he was expected to use the lash,
an instrument of which he had been very chary in his treatment of
four-legged chattels, and which he could not bring himself to apply
with anything but a sham force in reference to the two-legged species.
But this objection he thought to get over by using the sharp crack of
his Jehu-voice, as a substitute for that of the whip; and in this he
persevered, in spite of the jeers of the other drivers, who told him
the thing had been tried often, but that the self-conceit of the negro
met the stimulant and choked it at the very entrance to the ear; and
this he soon found to be true. So he began to do as others did, and he
was the sooner reconciled to the strange life into which he had been
precipitated by the happy condition of the slaves themselves, who,
when their work was over, and at all holiday hours, dressed themselves
in the brightest colours of red and blue and white, danced, sang, ate
corn-cakes and bacon, and drank coffee with a zest which would have
done a Scotch mechanic, with his liberty to produce a lock-out, much
good to see. True, indeed, the white element of the population was
at a discount at Peach Grove. But in addition to the above source
of reconciliation, Halket became day by day more captivated by the
beauty of the country, with its undulating surface, its wooded clumps,
its magnolias, tulip-trees, camellias, laurels, passion-flowers, and
palms, its bright-coloured birds, and all the rest of the beauties for
which it is famous all over the world. But nature might charm as it
might--Mary Brown was three thousand miles away.
Meanwhile the time passed pleasantly, for he was accumulating money,
Mary’s letter would be on the way, and the hope of seeing her within
the appointed time was dominant over all the fascinations which
charmed the senses. But when the month came in which he ought to have
received a letter, no letter came--not much this to be thought of,
though Mr Dreghorn tried to impress him with the idea that there must
be some change of sentiment in the person from whom he expected the
much-desired answer. So Halket wrote again, giving the letter, as
before, to his master, who assured him it was sent carefully away,
and while it was crossing the Atlantic he was busy in improving his
penmanship and arithmetic, under the hope held out to him by his master
that he would, if he remained, be raised to a book-keeper’s desk; for
the planter had seen early that he had got hold of a long-headed,
honest, sagacious “Sawny,” who would be of use to him. On with still
lighter wing the intermediate time sped again, but with no better
result in the shape of an answer from her who was still the object
of his day fancies and his midnight dreams. Nor did all this kill
his hope. A third letter was despatched, but the returning period
was equally a blank. We have been counting by months, which, as they
sped, soon brought round the termination of his year, and with growing
changes too in himself, for as the notion began to worm itself into
his mind that his beloved Mary was either dead or faithless, another
power was quietly assailing him from within, no other than ambition
in the most captivating of all shapes, Mammon. We all know the manner
in which the golden deity acquires his authority, nor do we need to
have recourse to the conceit of the old writer who tells us that the
reason why gold has such an influence upon man lies in the fact that
it is of the colour of the sun, which is the fountain of light, and
life, and joy. Certain it is, at least, that Halket having been taken
into the counting-house on a raised salary, began “to lay by,” as the
Scotch call it, and by and by, with the help of a little money lent to
him by his master, he began by purchasing produce from the neighbouring
plantations, and selling it where he might, all which he did with
advantage, yet with the ordinary result to a Scotsman, that while he
turned to so good account the king’s head, the king’s head began to
turn his own.
And now in place of months we must begin to count by lustrums, and
the first five years, even with all the thoughts of his dead, or, at
least, lost Mary, proved in Halket’s case the truth of the book written
by a Frenchman, to prove that a man is a plant, for he had already
thrown out from his head or heart so many roots in the Virginian soil
that he was bidding fair to be as firmly fixed in his new sphere as a
magnolia, and if that bore golden blossoms, so did he; yet, true to
his first love, there was not among all these flowers one so fair as
the fair-haired Mary. Nay, with all hope not yet extinguished, he had
even at the end of the period resolved upon a visit to Scotland, when
strangely enough, and sadly too, he was told by Mr Dreghorn that having
had occasion to hear from Mr Peter Ramsay on the subject of some more
horse dealings, that person had reported to him that Mary Brown, the
lover of his old stable-boy, was dead. A communication this which, if
it had been made at an earlier period, would have prostrated Halket
altogether, but it was softened by his long foreign anticipations, and
he was thereby the more easily inclined to resign his saddened soul
to the further dominion of the said god, Mammon, for as to the notion
of putting any of those beautiful half-castes he sometimes saw about
the planter’s house at Peach Grove, in the place of her of the golden
ringlets, it was nothing better than the desecration of a holy temple.
Then the power of the god increased with the offerings, one of which
was his large salary as manager, a station to which he was elevated
shortly after he had received the doleful tidings of Mary’s death.
Another lustrum is added, and we arrive at ten years, and yet another,
and we come to fifteen; at the end of which time Mr Dreghorn died,
leaving Halket as one of his trustees, for behoof of his wife, in whom
the great plantation vested. If we add yet another lustrum, we find
the Scot--fortunate, save for one misfortune that made him a joyless
worshipper of gold--purchasing from the widow, who wished to return to
England, the entire plantation under the condition of an annuity.
And Halket was now rich, even beyond what he had ever wished, but the
chariot-wheels of Time would not go any slower--nay, they moved faster,
and every year more silently, as if the old Father had intended to
cheat the votary of Mammon into a belief that he would live for ever.
The lustrums still passed: another five, another, and another, till
there was scope for all the world being changed, and a new generation
taking the place of that with which William Halket and Mary Brown
began; and he was changed too, for he began to take on those signs of
age which make the old man a painted character; but in one thing he
was not changed, and that was the worshipful steadfastness, the sacred
fidelity, with which he still treasured in his mind the form and face,
the words and the smiles, the nice and refined peculiarities that feed
love as with nectared sweets, which once belonged to Mary Brown, the
first creature that had moved his affections, and the last to hold
them, as the object of a cherished memory for ever. Nor with time so
deceptive, need we be so sparing in dealing out those periods of five
years, but say at once that at last William Halket could count twelve
of them since first he set his foot on Virginian soil: yea, he had been
there for sixty summers, and he had now been a denizen of the world for
seventy-eight years. In all which our narrative has been strange, but
we have still the stranger fact to set forth, that at this late period
he was seized with that moral disease (becoming physical in time)
which the French call _mal du pays_, the love of the country where one
was born and first enjoyed the fresh springs that gush from the young
heart. Nor was it the mere love of country, as such, for he was seized
with a particular wish to be where Mary lay in the churchyard of the
Canongate, to erect a tombstone over her, to seek out her relations and
enrich them, to make a worship out of a disappointed love, to dedicate
the last of his thoughts to the small souvenirs of her humble life.
Within a month this old man was on his way to Scotland, having sold the
plantation, and taken bills with him to an amount of little less than a
hundred thousand pounds.