CHAPTER X
NANCY VISITS HIS GRACE OF BORTHWICKE
At the time of which I write John Montrose, Duke of Borthwicke, Ardvilarchan, and Drumblaine, was the most noticed man in the Three Kingdoms, and held by many to be the greatest scoundrel in the politics of Europe. He was a picturesque and stately devil, tall, clean shaven, with fine features and damnable light blue eyes with a baffling gleam in them. He had a singular grace in the use of his body, especially in the movement of his hands, which were markedly expressive and attractive; and whether drawn to him or not, one could deny neither his potency nor his distinction of bearing, which was one of race as well as breeding. The first view I ever had of him was in Parliament House, where I noted on the instant the magnificent carriage of his head and chest, his extraordinary pallor, and the strange eyes, reflecting the light from without rather than revealing anything within.
In London, Edinburgh, and Dublin, the tide of gossip overflowed with his name and carried in its current tales of his greatness, his cruelty, his lawless loves and his quick forgettings. It was libeled against him that he had magnetic power over all with whom he came in contact, bending them to his will by the sheer dominance of his presence. There was, I recall, a story rife that upon my Lord Thurlow's opposition to the bill for the restoration of the forfeited estates becoming known, it was the Duke of Borthwicke who was sent to treat with him concerning it, and immediately after this visit the bill passed the House of Lords with small opposition.
It was whispered as well that Pitt himself was afraid of his Grace of Borthwicke, and was no match for the man, who had a peculiar power by reason of being unhampered either by truth or precedent. Blake, who was the duke's secretary in '84, told me at the club one night, that on one occasion his grace had needed some statistics to clinch an argument. After investigation the statistics were found to disprove his point. Upon this being presented to him, he remarked dryly, "Alter the statistics."
Ugly tales were abroad in all classes of society concerning his life in India, his conduct in the Highlands, and his moral idiocy, but he held them under with a strong hand, and more than one hinted that he had eyes for the premiership.
Dressed for the evening, the duke was alone in his sitting-room, attending to his private correspondence, when he heard a rap at the door.
"Enter," he called, in a careless voice, thinking it one of his men.
Nancy lifted the latch and came forward into the room.
"The Duke of Borthwicke will pardon my intrusion, will he not?" she asked, "as well as my lack of courtesy? I was afraid his grace might refuse to see me if I were announced to him in the ordinary manner."
Montrose had been writing at an oaken table, on either side of which was a bracket of lights. At the sound of the voice he turned, and, at the sight of Nancy, he rose and stood looking at her as though she were an apparition.
Many times since, in her description of this interview, she told me that she received from him an impression as though he stretched forth his hand and touched her. She said, as well, that the erectness of his body and the fulness of his chest gave him the air of a conqueror who was invincible, while the pallor of his face and the glitter of his eye set him still further apart from anything usual.
It seemed a full minute that they stood thus taking notes openly of each other before she spoke again.
"I am Nancy Stair," she said quietly.
"Ah," the duke returned, coming forward with a smile, "the verse-maker?"
"I make verses," Nancy answered.
"Which have given me more pleasure than I have the power to tell," the duke responded with a bow.
"It is praise indeed, coming from John Montrose, who is no mean poet himself," Nancy said with a smile.
"I," the duke returned, "am no poet, Mistress Stair; but I have a 'spunk enough of glee' to enjoy the gift of others."
"One might think who overheard us, my lord duke," Nancy broke in with a laugh and the light of humor in her eyes by which she could make another smile at any time, "that we were collegians having a critical discussion. It was not concerning poetry that I came to you to-night, your grace. It was to ask a favor."
"Pitcairn said you would come," the duke answered her blandly, taking out his watch and looking at it with a smile. "He said you would come before you went to the Duchess of Gordon's rout. He even named the exact time within a quarter of an hour."
"Mr. Pitcairn is a very wonderful man," Nancy returned.
"He's a poor hand at description," responded the duke, with a heat of admiration for her in his tone.
"It depends somewhat," said Nancy, "upon what he has the describing of." And in this speech the way women know how to belittle an enemy is clearly to be seen. "He can describe a barn to a farmer, a road to a surveyor, or a church to an architect, so that they fall into an ecstasy of admiration of his parts. When it comes to a woman it's a different matter. Mr. Pitcairn doesn't know a woman. He's not, rightly speaking, a man. As Mr. Carmichael says, 'He's just a head.'"
"It's a curious head," the duke answers, "a curious head and a very clear one."
"A clear head to prosecute; never to defend," Nancy responded; "which leads me to the cause of my visit. I have come to ask for the pardon of Timothy Lapraik."
The duke dropped his eyelids, and a strange light shone from under them.
"You compliment me, Mistress Stair, in thinking I have the power to undo that which was settled by the law of your country and a jury tried and true. I took no part in the affair; the prosecution was not mine; in a word, the thing is perhaps beyond my power, had I the desire to get him a pardon, which, however, I have not."
All this time neither had made any motion toward sitting down, but stood regarding each other, alert and watchful. It was Nancy Stair who took the first move. Coming over to the duke she put one of her hands on his breast and stood looking up at him out of those gray eyes of whose power she was not unconscious.
"My lord," she said, "I, who have had the handling of people much of my life, have learned to recognize power when I see it, and I see it in you. There's just naught you can't do that you set your mind to."
None ever claimed that in his relation with women the duke was afflicted with Pitcairn's trouble, and a blue heat came in his eye at her touch of him.
"You're not afraid of me, Nancy Stair?"
She looked up at him from under her eyelids and laughed.
"Not the least bit in the world, your grace."
"And ye think, mayhap, that just because ye're a beautiful woman—aye, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen—that ye can come to me and ask favors, thinking that I shall expect nothing in return?"
"What I have heard of you would lead me far from such conclusion," Nancy answered, with a smile.
He looked at her in silence, with an amused expression in his face.
"I like you," he said at length, and a dare-devil look came into his eyes, a look which showed at once his strength and his weakness. "I like your fearlessness as well as your honesty. I can mate your frankness by my own. I have long desired to know what is said of me, and have a mind to make a compact with you, if you will. I hear lies on every side. They are the stuff of which my daily bread is baked. Come," he cried, "a bargain between us. The naked truth which ye have heard concerning me in return for the pardon of Timothy Lapraik."
"It's a bargain between us, your grace."
"There will be no slurring over, no soft adjustments?"
"You need have no fear. If you knew me better you would not ask that," Nancy answered with a smile. "You shall have the unsoftened truth, so far as it is mine to speak."
The duke motioned her to a seat by the fire and stood opposite to her, changing the candles on the shelf above to throw the light full upon her face as she sat before the fire.
"'Tis an awkward position you put me in," Nancy laughed.
"'Tis grace itself compared to the awkwardness of mine," the duke returned with a dry smile.
"The first thing I ever heard of you," she began, "was that you were known by common repute as the 'Lying Duke of the Highlands.'"
The duke bowed.
"I have heard from high and low that you have neither the code of a gentleman nor the common honesty of business affairs. It is even argued that you have not the moral perception to see your own lack in such matters."
The duke looked at her steadily for a moment again and his lips curled back into a smile.
"You are openly accused of thefts in India—of defrauding the ignorant natives of their lands."
The duke made a little outward motion with his hand, as though to intimate that these charges were already known to him.
"It is said—and this seems to me one of the worst charges—that you assail the names of those whose places you desire for yourself or your friends, under cover, and in ways impossible for them to circumvent."
The duke shrugged his shoulders as if this charge were one of small moment.
"But 'tis of your treatment of women that the worst stories of you are abroad, and 'tis said that your conduct toward them is that of a brute rather than of a man. There is a tale of one woman, the wife of a baronet, who left her husband for you, and whom ye after deserted to poverty and disgrace."
She paused a moment and turned to recapitulate.
"Liar," she said.
The duke bowed slightly.
"Thief."
The duke bent his head a bit lower.
"Defrauder, blackmailer, and betrayer of women."
The duke rose and made a profound salutation, and Nancy regarded him with a smile.
"I do not think of any other thing," she concluded; and then, as though there was still hope for him, "I have never heard your grace accused of open murder."
"'Tis strange," the duke answered her with a queer look. "I have enough of the artist in me to see that the open murder would have been finely climactic. There is but one of these charges that I desire to deny to you," looking at the fire through his eyeglass as he spoke; "I don't lie," he said, adding, with the shadow of a smile, "I don't have to. And may I ask, Mistress Stair, do you believe these things of me?"
Nancy rose and looked into the fire.
"I like you," she answered.
"In spite of my crimes?"
"Because of your power," she responded.
They stood for a moment regarding each other steadily before another word was spoken.
"Ah, my lord," she said, "I must be going," and there was a shade of regret in her voice, which Borthwicke was not the man to let pass unnoticed, "I have kept my word."
"True," the duke answered, "you have kept your word."
"You will keep yours to me?" she asked, extending her hand.
"By this time to-morrow Lapraik shall be a free man," the duke answered, holding the extended hand in his.
"Thank you," she said, and another silence fell between them as they stood thus, nearer together, dominated by magnetic attraction so strong that a full minute passed unnoted by either.
"It is my turn to ask favors," the duke said headily. "The rose in your breast."
"Shall I fasten it on your coat?" she asked.
So for a moment more they stood almost touching each other, his breath moving the curls of her hair as she reached toward him.
"Good night," he said, extending his hand again.
"Good night," she said, putting hers into it.
"You have your people with you?"
"Yes."
"It is better then I should not come down?"
"Much better," she answered, after a second; and then, turning to him: "You are coming to the Duchess of Gordon's?"
"I had intended to remain away till I saw you. What do you think I shall do now?" his grace asked.
"How should I know, my lord duke?" Nancy inquired, with a smile.
"What do you think I am going to do now?" he repeated with insistence.
"I think you will come to the Gordons'," Nancy answered in a low voice.
"I may kiss your hand?" the duke asked; and, as he did so, the act having in it more of a caress than a salutation, "Believe me," he said, "I could not stay away."
After Nancy and Dandy had left us, Carmichael and I sat smoking, and by reason of the talk falling along some interesting lines we arrived at the Gordons' long past the time set for our party to meet. Nearing the house we heard the music of the fiddles filling the air with glee and sadness, and saw the caddies darting hither and thither, the link-boys with their torches, and the flare of lights on the dazzling toilets of the ladies descending from their chairs and coaches. My own position in Edinburgh society was stated to me quite by accident, as I entered, by a group of young dandies at the ballroom door, who made way for me with a pronounced salute and whispered:
"'Tis her father."
Jane Gordon welcomed me with a gay and genuine friendship, and as Sandy and I made our salutations to her I saw Nancy at some little distance from us, literally surrounded by fatuous cipher-faced youths, who stood in some awe before her misty beauty and reputed power. There was pride in me that the girl was mine, a pride which Sandy Carmichael shared with me, and as Hugh Pitcairn crossed the long room to salute her gravely but with marked respect, I saw that there was at least one emotion which they held in common.
Standing by the great window soon after my arrival, a bit removed from a group of talking persons to whom I was giving but scant attention, I became conscious that some one was addressing me, and turned to find the Duke of Borthwicke, his hand laid lightly on my shoulder, his countenance of baffling serenity, and his voice mellow and of a conciliating quality. He wore gray satin of an elegant finish, but neither embroidery nor jewels, and, notwithstanding his position and power, conveyed the impression in some adroit way, subtler than I can set forth, that he deprecated his temerity in addressing so austere a person as myself. I had seen women use this essence of flattery, but it was the first time I ever found it employed by a man.
"Will my Lord Stair allow me to introduce myself to him?" he inquired, with a smile, extending his hand. "I am John Montrose, and there are many reasons why we should determine to be good friends."
"We are both Highland folk," I answered.
"Which is one excellent reason," he interrupted; "yet there are several more moving than that. Your father, Lord Stair, and mine were out together in the forty-fives, on which side I need scarcely mention; and again, your grandfather and mine both loved and fought for the beautiful Nancy Hamilton, and, but for the preference of the lady herself, she might have been my own grandmother. These things call for a friendly feeling between us, Lord Stair, but that which drives me forward most to your acquaintancy is the admiration I have for the writings of your daughter, Mistress Nancy, whose lines ring through my head more often than I care to tell, and whose poems have been upon my writing-table ever since they were published."
In this pleasant way we fell to talk of Nancy, of her gifts, her beauty, her loving tenderness for all things, her strange up-bringing, her people on the Burnside; and to a doting father such as I was the time flew quickly by.
I noted at length that there was some stir in the circle around her, and watched her cross the room with her Grace of Gordon and Danvers Carmichael in attendance, to the musicians' place in the great window.
I have wondered at times if folk who dwell on the temptations male creatures have think ever of those which come to women of great attractiveness to men. The thought came to me as Nancy took her place beside the harp and violins, which were to accompany her singing, and I sent a prayer to Heaven to keep my child unspotted from the world, uttering it none the less fervently because his Grace of Borthwicke, with lids veiling the fire of his eyes, was looking at her.
Twice she sang, her songs being of her own land, one of the highlands, with the perfume of the gorse and the heather in the lilt of it, and the second, by demand of Sandy, the gipsy song which had been handed down from woodland mother to woodland child for hundreds of years; a song which sent Nancy's lawless blood to her cheeks and set her heart beating with an inherited remembrance of raids and sea-fights, and lawless loves; which made her eyes misty with tears and unawakened passion; the song which I had learned to dread, Marian's song:
"Love that is Life,Love that is Death,Love that is mine"——
"Love that is Life,Love that is Death,Love that is mine"——
"Love that is Life,
Love that is Death,
Love that is mine"——
And as she finished, carried off her feet by her own feelings, she looked toward us for a moment; but it was neither upon me nor Danvers Carmichael that the look fell; for, as one who knows she will be understood, her glance turned to his Grace of Borthwicke, whose eyes told a tale so openly that he who ran might read. I was more disturbed by this occurrence than I cared to admit, and after the supper, when Nancy, attended still by Danvers Carmichael, came back to us, I was glad to hear her say that she wished to go home. His Grace of Borthwicke being still near us, it fell upon me to present Danvers Carmichael to him, an introduction which Dandy acknowledged by a perfunctory bow and scant courtesy, and the duke by turning his eyes for one second in Dandy's direction and repeating his name as "McMichael" in the exasperating manner of one who neither knows nor cares who the person is who has been presented to him; and although at the time of the murder the lawyers tried to have it that the acquaintance between these two men was of London breeding, I can vouch for it, from my own knowledge and the testimony of Danvers Carmichael to me on our way home, that this was the first time he and the duke ever set eyes on each other.
In just the manner in which I have set it forth, in the compass of a few days, the three most important factors in Nancy's life came to the working out of it, Robert Burns, though but by book; Danvers Carmichael, a gentleman; and that splendid devil, John Montrose, Duke of Borthwicke, Ardvilarchan and Drumblaine in the Muirs.
CHAPTER XI
DANVERS CARMICHAEL MAKES A PROPOSAL
Whether the conduct of the Duke of Borthwicke brought a climax to the affairs between Danvers and Nancy I can not state for a surety, but the next morning as I sat alone on the south porch the boy came upon me with some suddenness.
"Lord Stair," he said, "it is with my father's knowledge and pleasurable consent that I come to ask your permission to have Nancy for my wife, if she can fancy me as a husband."
He turned very white as he spoke, but his bearing was manly and brave as that of his father's son should be, and my heart went out to him.
"Sit ye down, laddie," I said, "sit ye down. We'll have a smoke together and talk it over. I'm not denying that I like you for the two best reasons in the world. The first, for yourself; and the second, that ye're your father's son. And to pretend that a wedding between you two children would not give me the greatest pleasure in life would be idiot foolishness. I feel it my duty to you, however, as well as to my girl, to talk the thing over plainly. Have you any notion now," I asked, "as to Nancy's feeling toward you?"
"None whatever," he answers, gloomily enough.
"You've not questioned her in any way——"
"I'm a man of honor, Lord Stair," he responded, a bit in the air.
"Well, then," said I, "it will do no harm to set some of the obstacles before you that you may be allowed to deal with the situation bare-handed.
"Ye must see, Dandy, that Nancy Stair is different from other women and has been raised in a strange way. I'm no saying it's either a good way or a bad. I am saying that it's far from the accepted way women are bred up generally. It's no mere talent she has—for in a woman that's not harmful and frequently helps to entertain the children, as they come along; but with a girl, raised by men, whose name is ringing throughout the kingdom, who baffles every one by unfailing love and kindness, who has only the religion of making things better for others; a bit of a coquette, with such magnetism that one wants to touch her as one does a flower—I tell ye frankly, Danvers, as Pitcairn says, she's a dangerous contrivance of the Almighty's, and a man had best think many times before he takes her to his bosom as a wife."
"It's a singular state of affairs," Danvers answers, with a short laugh, "and one for which, I venture, even Nancy could find no bookish parallel. You tell me that you'd like me for a son-in-law, but warn me against your own daughter as a wife; while my father takes the other view of it: that he would like Nancy for his daughter, but thinks I'm far from being the one suited to her as a husband. Parents are not usually so dispassionate," he added, somewhat bitterly. I felt for the lad, and took a step along a side path.
"Ye're both over young as yet," I said, "and it's been less than a month since ye've known each other." And it was here that I had a taste of his fine temper, for he turned upon me in a sudden heat that made him splendid and natural to the eye.
"I have not heard that my Lord Stair was over-deliberate in his own wooing," he said.
I laughed aloud as he glowered at me, and put my hand on his shoulder, for I liked his impetuous ways and his deil's temper.
"There, there," I said, "gang your own gate. I but wanted ye to know what ye might expect in a wife. She'll contradict ye——"
"I don't want a wife who is an echo of myself," he retorted.
"She's jealous——"
"I wouldn't give a groat for a woman who wasn't," he responded.
"She is so extravagant," I went on, "that I never let even Sandy know her bills."
He made no answer to this whatever, as though it were a matter beneath discussion.
"She will forget you for days at a time while she's rhyme-making," I went on. "She will be interested in other men until the day she dies—" his eye darkened at this—"and to sum it up, I don't know any woman more unsuited to you; but if she will have you, you've my consent," and I reached out my hand to him. "God bless you," I cried, and before our hands had parted Sandy came around the turn of the path.
"You've done just what I knew you'd do, Jock Stair," he said, glowering first at his son and then at me, "and ye know as well as I the foolishness of it. Take a man like this lad, who has been spoiled by an overfond mother, and a woman like Nancy, who has had her own way since birth, marry them to each other, and you've a magnificent basis for trouble. Why don't you marry your cousin Isabel? You'd thoughts of it before you left London!" he ended, in a futile way.
"I'm going to marry Nancy Stair, if she'll have me," Danvers replied, doggedly.
"Well, well, she may not have you," Sandy replied, soothingly. "And as she's under the lilacs you may care to join her."
Nothing passed between Danvers and Nancy on the subject of marriage that morning, and I found at luncheon a probable explanation of the fact by reason of her absorption in the labor training idea and the building of an extension on the Burnside.
Between this scheme, her talk of Robert Burns, her interest in his Grace of Borthwicke, and an absolute and unnatural silence concerning Danvers, I was in some anxiety, and could come to no conclusion whatever concerning the state of her feelings. I mentioned Danvers' good looks, and she quoted me back "The Cotter's Saturday Night." I praised his conduct, and she answered with "The Epistle to Davie." It was the name of Burns that was constantly upon her lips; she set his verses to the music of old songs, singing them softly to herself in the gloaming, and I could see had made a god of him by her own imaginings.
"That Burns book was a bad investment for you," I said to Danvers one evening.
"Why," says he, "it's naught but a book!"
"True," I answered, "but the maker of it is a man—and she's idealized him into a god. Ye just brought trouble for yourself when you brought that volume among us," I cried.
To the best of my recollection it was about a week after my talk with Danvers concerning a marriage between them that the three of us sat at the dinner together, and there never was a more bewitching or dangerous Nancy than we had with us that night. A tender, brilliant, saucy, flattering Nancy, who moved us male creatures about as though we were chessmen.
"Jock, tell about the old minister and the goose," she said. "There's no one can tell that story like you."
Or,
"Danvers, do you recall the anecdote of Billy Deuceace and the opera-singer? It's one of the best jokes I ever heard." And it was after the laugh that followed this narration that Danvers said, with some abruptness, I thought:
"We had bad news to-day. The Honorable Mrs. Erskine and her daughter are coming to Arran. My father invited them over a year ago, and had forgotten all about it when their letter of acceptance came."
"Is it Isabel Erskine whom your father advises you to marry?" Nancy asked.
"It is the very same," Dandy answered with a careless laugh; "and I'm warning you you are to have a rival in the same house with me!"
"Is she pretty?"
"She's well enough," he replied indifferently.
"I believe," said Nancy, looking through her wine-glass far off somewhere, "that she'll suit you better than I."
"She treats me better."
"She doesn't write verses?" this with a glance from under her eyelids.
"She does not."
"Nor think her own way always the best?"
"She's very sweet and yielding, as becomes a woman," Danvers answered teasingly.
"She's just without sin at all," Nancy continued with apparent dejection.
"Entirely," Danvers returned solemnly, but with a laugh shining through his long black lashes.
"Then I'd better not meet with her—I, who have so many failings."
"Have you failings?" Dandy asked, and the teasing tone left him. "I've yet to find them."
And at this Nancy broke into a laugh so funny and contagious that the two of us joined with her.
"Have I failings?" she repeated. "That I have! And so many 'twould be a day's work to name them.
"Sometimes," she began, "I make light of other folks' religion when I disagree with it—and that's little short of scandalous. And I belittle the people whom I don't like—and there's no breeding in that; and where a friend is concerned I'm like the Stewarts, 'Back to back, and a claymore in each hand,' and——"
"Ye're right in that," Danvers and I broke in like a chorus.
"And sometimes," she went on, and the humor she found in these revelations concerning herself was a droll thing to see, "sometimes I use bad language——"
We men broke into a roar of laughter at this.
"Once, I remember," she said, with the gleam in her eye, "I danced till three in the morning at Peggy MacBride's wedding, and getting out of the coach twisted my arm till I thought I'd broken it. About four of the same morning I rose with a raging tooth, and crossing the room for laudanum, I struck the elbow of the injured arm against a chest of drawers, and before I thought I said——"
"What?" Danvers cried, his face lit up with merriment.
"Nothing will ever make me tell," she said firmly, "nothing!"
"Whatever it was, it was moderate. You haven't a vocabulary sufficient for that situation, Nancy Stair," I laughed.
"Then, too, I'm no respecter of family," she went on, as though set for complete absolution. "It's mayhap because my own mother was an Irish gipsy——"
"Nancy!" Dandy cried with amazement.
"She was so," Nancy insisted, "and the present lord's grandfather was a strange old cummer who ran away with another man's wife——"
"Nancy!" I expostulated, "Nancy, you mustn't talk in that way of your forbears——"
"Why not?" she inquired.
"It's a thing ye can't explain, my dear; but it just isn't done," Dandy said.
"Is it not?" she asked, and there was a look in her eyes of amused amazement. "Is it not? You see, I, in my poor blind way, can not understand why the naming of a thing is worse than the being of it—but if ye say it is, I'm amiable. I'll give out that my forbears were all kings and queens of the Egyptians, and that I ate my haggis when I was a child from the seat of the throne. It makes no difference to me, for I'm something more than the Laird of Stair's daughter."
"Meaning the future Countess of Glenmore, mayhap?" I suggested.
"I'm not meaning any such thing, and it's perhaps not becoming for me to explain what I do mean; but whether I say it of myself or 'tis said of me in the Glasgow Sentinel, it makes little differ, for I have the verse-making, and 'tis more to me than lands or titles.
"Aye," she said, after a pause, with a laugh as though making fun of her conceit of herself, "I have the genius——"
At the end of the meal, before she left us, bewildered by her vivacity and charm, she stopped at the door.
"Am I nice?" she asked.
"Very," said Danvers and I.
"And will ye give me," she asked, as a child might have done, "the thousand pounds for Father Michel?"
"I will not," I answered, the yielding in me showing through the words.
Danvers saw his chance and took it with the spur.
"I will," he said, going toward her to open the door, but it looked more as though he meant to take her in his arms, "I will, Nancy."
She looked at him with a softness in her eyes.
"Thank you, Danvers," she said, and the glance made me think that, even did I allow such a manifest impossibility, he could never have invested money in any way to bring him a richer return.
It was a task beyond me to get sensible talk from him with Nancy waiting in the moonlight, a moonlight fragrant with honeysuckle and climbing roses; and I bade him to be off to her; and I opened the papers which had come by a late post.
I heard a merry talk between them as Huey came in to say that the white night-flowers were in bloom by the fountain, and I went off with him to have a look at them. As I came back I turned into the path which led to the porch, intending to tell them of these wonderful blooms, when I saw the two of them on the steps, standing near together, and Danvers's arms were around the girl he loved, and he was looking down into her eyes with rapture in his fond, handsome face, and I heard him say:
"When, when,when?"
"When do you want it?" she asked.
"When do I want it! Now, to-night," and he drew her lips to his.
"Wife!" he said.
When I reentered the library I found it occupied by Sandy, who had walked across country from his own place with some news concerning the whisky tax. As we sat in dispute over it, upward of an hour later, I heard Nancy go to her room without coming in to wish us a good night, and a second later Danvers Carmichael stood in the doorway. It was good for us older men to see the lad, and at the sight of him I was out under the stars of Landgore; the sound of gipsy singing, the salt from the sea, and the odor of blown hawthorn were in the room, and I was young again with Marian Ingarrach folded in my arms. The brooding look was gone from his eyes and his face bore a strange illumination. He had added something to, rather than lost any of the cocksureness of his manner; but the happiness of him, combined with the love and passion of his ardent nature, made him a singularly handsome creature as he came toward us.
"Will you not congratulate me?" he said, looking from one to the other of us.
"Is she willing to marry you?" his father asked, with exaggerated amazement.
"If she finds none whom she fancies more, she said she would marry me within the year——"
"Well, well, there's some hope for you," Sandy went on. "She may meet in with some one else."
"You've my pity," I laughed, but I took his hand in mine with the words.
His joy radiated itself to us, and his talk was just as it should be for his years. He patronized us a bit for being older and out of the way of it all, spoke of Nancy as though she were the only woman since Eve, and discussed a betrothal ring as though it were a thing for empires to rise and fall by.
"She fancies rubies; she cares for gems, you know," he said, as though the information was new to us instead of having been anciently and expensively bought.
He must have the best ruby in Scotland, he went on. He wished he could attend to the matter himself. "But," he stood with his thumbs in the arms of his waistcoat as he spoke, with a conscious smile—"but no fellow would be such a bally ass as to dash to London for a ring under present conditions." There were the four thousand pounds his grandmother had given him. They might all be spent for this. There was a fellow named Billy Deuceace, an Oxford man, with taste in such matters. He would write him concerning it to-night, he said.
"Faith," said Sandy, drolly, "you talk as if married life were all a ring. Ye'll find it different when your wife has the genius and is taken up wi' other men."
And Danvers faced the two of us here by a statement which has never left me from the night he uttered it till the minute of my setting it down.
"I am far from believing," he said, "that genius is a thing which rightly belongs to women. 'Tis to me but an issue on one side. And the woman who has enough of her husband's kisses and his babies at her breast has little time to write verses or think of other men."
With these words still ringing in my ears I rapped at Nancy's door on my way to bed, to find her sitting by a glaring light with the everlasting Burns book in her hand. I was a bit dashed in spirit by her occupation, for it seemed unnatural that a girl should be spending the time immediately after her betrothal in such an employ, and I affected a gaiety I was far from feeling.
"Is it to Nancy Stair or the possible Countess of Glenmore that I speak?"
She stood by the table, her finger still marking her place in the book.
"Dandy told you, then?" she asked.
"Told us!" I echoed. "It's my opinion he'll tell the town-crier to-night and have it in all the prints of the realm within the week."
"He told you just what the understanding was?"
I repeated what he had said, and she nodded at the end in acquiescence.
"You see," she said, coming toward me and putting her head on my shoulder, "I'm not sure of myself. My mind's ill redd up for marriage with any one. I've had too much freedom, perhaps; and while one side of my nature, probably the strongest one, loves Danvers Carmichael, I am drawn to the writer of these lines, this Burns man, in a way I can not tell; and at the very foot of the matter I am mightily taken up with the power of John Montrose. It's no highly moral, is it?" she asked, with an amused smile, "to feel ye could be in love with two—three men at once? But my nature's many sided, and on one of these sides I find a most 'treacherous inclination' toward his Grace of Borthwicke."
CHAPTER XII
I MEET A GREAT MAN
"With knowledge so vast and with judgment so strongNo man with the half of them e'er could go wrong;With passion so potent, and fancies so bright,No man with the half of them e'er could go right."
"With knowledge so vast and with judgment so strongNo man with the half of them e'er could go wrong;With passion so potent, and fancies so bright,No man with the half of them e'er could go right."
"With knowledge so vast and with judgment so strong
No man with the half of them e'er could go wrong;
With passion so potent, and fancies so bright,
No man with the half of them e'er could go right."
I passed as miserable a night as my worst enemy could have wished and was up at the dawning for a jaunt in the open. The gowans so white and bonny were swinging their dewy heads in the morning wind; the sea-fog was lifting skyward, and whether the message came from them I can not say, but a mystical white word floated between me and my troubled thoughts of Nancy—a word which means the changing of baser metal into pure gold, the returning of the balance to nature, the fine adjustment of spirit to mind and body—the great word Motherhood. Nancy as a mother. My Little Flower with a floweret of her own might be the solution of a happy marriage for her more than compensating for the independence and adulation which she had always had.
As I tramped along I came to a definite thought concerning the Burns poems as well, which was that I would set fire to them, as if by accident, that very day, and have them by and done with. And as for the man himself, it would, I thought, be no hard matter to keep him out of our lives; in which conclusions I left out just two things—the throw of Fate, which none of us can reckon upon, and my own rhyme-loving nature and fondness for being entertained.
It was Fate's throw with which I had to reckon first. I had come in my musings to a side-path which led from the old Abbey to the foot-bridge, when I heard the sound of a man's singing:
"As I cam in by Glenap,I met wi' an ancient woman,Who told me to cheer my heart upFor the best of my days were comin'."
"As I cam in by Glenap,I met wi' an ancient woman,Who told me to cheer my heart upFor the best of my days were comin'."
"As I cam in by Glenap,
I met wi' an ancient woman,
Who told me to cheer my heart up
For the best of my days were comin'."
The singer was sitting upon a fallen tree, beside a smoking fire, with the women, children, aye, and the very dogs, gathered about him as though he carried a charm. He was a thick-set man, dark and swarthy, with a pair of eyes literally glowing. His hat was cocked upon the back of his head, and he had his plaid thrown around him in a certain manner known to himself alone. He was eating and drinking with these gipsy-folk, for he'd a bannock in one hand and a mug of hot drink in the other, but at sight of me he set them down and came forward to greet me; and my amazed eyes rested on Robert Burns himself, as though raised up by some of his own witches to fit into my thoughts—Robert Burns whom I had met at Mauchline before he was famous, the year before.
He inquired if I were stepping townward, and on the instant I asked him to breakfast with me at the Star and Garter, and this, you will remember, within five short minutes of my resolve to burn his book and keep him out of our lives.
It was charged against me later that I was lax in this Burns affair and, because of my own infatuation for men of parts, took too little thought for the temptation to which I exposed my daughter. I answer the accusation by telling the circumstances exactly as they fell, and he who reads may judge the truth of these charges for himself. As we came to the door of the inn, I asked Creech and Dundas, who happened to be passing, to join us at the breakfast, and a merry feast it was, and one for the three of us to hold as a lifelong memory, for only those who had the honor to know Burns could understand that the "best of him was in his talk." In the year of which I write all the eyes of Edinburgh were fixed upon him, and his toasts, his epigrams, his love affairs were the scandal of the town and his own countryside. There was some flouting of him at this very meal, I recall, by Creech, who was deep in his affairs, concerning a Mauchline lassie who had thrown his love back at him with some violence and scandal; but he was not in the least dashed either by the event or the naming of it, and, seizing a glass, he called out, with the jolliest laugh in the world:
"Their tricks and crafts hae put me daft,They've ta'en me in—and a' that,But clear your decks! and here's 'The Sex,'I like the jades for a' that,"——
"Their tricks and crafts hae put me daft,They've ta'en me in—and a' that,But clear your decks! and here's 'The Sex,'I like the jades for a' that,"——
"Their tricks and crafts hae put me daft,
They've ta'en me in—and a' that,
But clear your decks! and here's 'The Sex,'
I like the jades for a' that,"——
the applause which greeted this sally bringing the servants to the window, though, in fact, when it was known that Burns was in the house there was no keeping them out of the room.
I do not feel, even at this late day, that I need an excuse for the admiration I have of Burns, the greatest poet, in my judgment, who ever lived. I knew his faults, if faults they were, but, before God, I knew his temptations as well, and can speak with greatest thankfulness of one he put behind him.
Pastor Muirkirk, of the New Light, in one of his more relaxed moments, said to me:
"The Lord cast seven devils out of the man in the scriptures because his nature was big enough to hold seven devils. Most of us, laddie," he went on, "are not big enough to hold half a devil," which explains the thought I have of Burns to a nicety, for it was surely the very bigness of his nature, the instant sympathy with all who lived, which brought many of the troubles to him for which he has been greatly blamed. But this can be said of him: that no man I ever knew, from the highest lord in the land down, presented himself to the world in a saner or more balanced manner. I have known him to breakfast with tramps at an ale-house in the morning, walk arm in arm with a duke down High Street in the afternoon, and leave him perchance to dine with some poor country acquaintance up from Ayr for a day's buying.
It was after Creech and his friend had left us that Burns turned toward me.
"There is a matter upon which I am undecided whether it is good taste for me to speak to you, Lord Stair," he said, "but there is such sincerity of admiration at the root of it that ye'll can just be forgiving me if I trespass on your sense of the proprieties. 'Tis of your daughter, Mistress Stair. I was carried off my feet by her singing at the charity ball, and the verses she writes are as unstudied as the song of a lark. But she will never write a poem that is so great as herself. All her accomplishments seem to me but a set of warbles or trills to the true song of her great womanhood. 'Where she is,'" he quoted prettily, "'man will be more than his wont, because of her belief.'"
And at these words my resolutions were clean forgotten in my pride in his praises of her.
"She wants to know you, Mr. Burns. Your book is by her day and night," I cried, at which he looked flattered, but said he was for Ayr that afternoon, and the pleasure of an acquaintance with her must be put by until some later date.
I told him at this that a friend had invited us down to his part of the country for the fair, where we might meet again, on which he took a slip from his pocket, putting his Edinburgh address on one side of it, like this: