CHAPTER XLV.It took Herries three full days to accomplish the business of which he had spoken to the poet. When he returned to Dumfries, the town was ringing with the death of Burns. A suppressed excitement seemed to pervade the streets; men spoke in muffled voices, awe-stricken, of the great spirit fled—and women cried to think of the destitute young widow, with her flock of orphans, who must so soon, in double peril, and under the very shadow of death, give to the world the poet's posthumous child.Herries felt a great delicacy in presenting himself at the house of mourning, and yet time pressed, and the possession of the letters was of vital importance to him. He waited one day, and then, on the morning of his departure, directed his steps to the Wee Vennel. This time the door was opened to him by Jessie Lewars, her pretty face swollen and discoloured by tears.'I was directed by—by the late Mr. Burns to call here for a packet of letters,' said Herries, with respectful hesitancy.'We were bidden to expect you, sir,' answered the girl, and then she added that invitation which, under the circumstances, among the peasantry of Scotland, is never withheld and never refused: 'Will you be pleased to come up the stair and view the corpse, sir?' Herries followed her upstairs, but she did not enter the room with him. He was left to do that alone.It was the same room in which he had spoken with the poet, but now swept and garnished, and with a Puritan simplicity and dignity in its poor belongings that went strangely to the heart. The widow rose from her seat at the bed's head. Herries had seen her before, but only now realised that this must be Jean Armour. With a singularly unaffected gesture of restrained and decent sorrow, she removed, in silence, the fair white linen kerchief that covered the face of her dead. Herries, with folded arms, and with a singular mixture of emotions, looked long upon the splendid mask. As in life, the dark hair swept the pallid brow, and though the glory of those eyes was quenched under the sealed lids that would lift no more, there was, in the fixed and immutable gravity of the lifeless face, a language beyond all looks, beyond all uttered speech: that air of incommunicable knowledge which, in the Dead, baffles the living with its eternal silence.After a few minutes the widow, gently and reverently, covered the face once more.'It was to be,' she said simply, with the quiet fatalism of her class. She turned and took from the table a packet of letters, and handed them to Herries without a word. He noted the quivering of her bloodless lip, but noted, too, the mild placidity of her wise, broad brow. Without some such element of enduring calm, never, surely, could Jean Armour have met the complicated trials of her life.Herries took the letters from her with an almost humble reverence, and, strangely subdued in spirit, left the house and journeyed from the town.* * * * *As Herries, thus leaving Dumfries, turned his horse's head to the north, 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 Æsculapius 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?''Oh, I think so, I think so!' said the good-natured man of medicine with his husky laugh. 'But I'll not tell on you ('twould hardly do, you know) in after days!' He fetched another tumbler from his cupboard and would have Herries taste with him before he went. And so the aristocratic and reserved lawyer of George Street found himself sitting in the stuffy parlour of an unknown country doctor, with a singular tumult in his blood, a new and tender anticipation at his heart, drinking to happier days.The laird of The Mains, however, falsified the prediction of his medical attendant and lingered for nearly two years, then dying in his chair. He was gathered to his fathers in the family vault, and friends and neighbours, gathered to his funeral, noted one stranger sharing in his obsequies—a stranger to all but Alison and the old doctor. The same man, in the dusk of the evening, spoke with Alison at the little gate under the lime tree—Alison, tall and pale and sad, in a black gown. It was no moment to speak of love, but, nevertheless, these two did then, in an enforced secrecy, arrange their future. A second time would Alison leave her home, and leave it in secret. For Mrs. Graham was set upon a perverse and obstinate opposition to any marriage for her last remaining daughter, rightly estimating the loss, to her, as one of a superior and most hard-working servant. Alison, who had battled so long, had no more strength and no more courage for the fight. In a month she and Archibald Herries fled to Edinburgh town, and were married by license.That it was a merry wedding, you are not asked to believe. For, firstly, it took place almost in the shadow of death; and then, happiness that comes after long tarrying, comes—but comes timidly—like a flower that blows too late and trembles for the storm. Yet, in the spring after, the same plant will throw out vigorous and fearless shoots. And so it was, I feel sure, with Alison and Archibald Herries. They were happy in their marriage; children were born to them in the fine George Street house, and there were gay summer migrations to the Galloway home, and all the due symbols of a rational and well-deserved prosperity. I think that to the last they were on calling—if not cordial—terms, with Clarinda, and that Willy Maclehose, grown a fine young man, was a frequent visitor at their house.But these things are all past and gone now. Alison's children are dust, and their children, I daresay, are preparing in turn for the inevitable abdication. For so the world wags, and we live and die, and Nature renews, for each one of us, the slowly-moving pageant of joy and sorrow, of passion and of pain. But it is the RHYMER, of whatsoever generation he may be, singing of these things for us so that we all understand, who is the only Immortal.BURNS TO CLARINDA'Ae fond kiss and then we sever,Ae fareweel and then forever!Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,Warring sighs and groans, I'll wage thee.Who shall say that fortune grieves himWhile the star of hope she leaves him?Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me,Dark despair around benights me.'I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,Naething could resist my Nancy;But to see her was to love her;Love but her and love forever.Had we never loved sae kindly,Had we never loved sae blindly,Never met or never parted,We had ne'er been broken-hearted.'Fare thee well, thou first and fairest!Fare thee well, thou best and dearest!Thine be ilka joy and treasure,Peace, contentment, love and pleasure.Ae fond kiss and then we sever;'Ae fareweel, alas! forever.Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.'*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKTHE RHYMER***
CHAPTER XLV.
It took Herries three full days to accomplish the business of which he had spoken to the poet. When he returned to Dumfries, the town was ringing with the death of Burns. A suppressed excitement seemed to pervade the streets; men spoke in muffled voices, awe-stricken, of the great spirit fled—and women cried to think of the destitute young widow, with her flock of orphans, who must so soon, in double peril, and under the very shadow of death, give to the world the poet's posthumous child.
Herries felt a great delicacy in presenting himself at the house of mourning, and yet time pressed, and the possession of the letters was of vital importance to him. He waited one day, and then, on the morning of his departure, directed his steps to the Wee Vennel. This time the door was opened to him by Jessie Lewars, her pretty face swollen and discoloured by tears.
'I was directed by—by the late Mr. Burns to call here for a packet of letters,' said Herries, with respectful hesitancy.
'We were bidden to expect you, sir,' answered the girl, and then she added that invitation which, under the circumstances, among the peasantry of Scotland, is never withheld and never refused: 'Will you be pleased to come up the stair and view the corpse, sir?' Herries followed her upstairs, but she did not enter the room with him. He was left to do that alone.
It was the same room in which he had spoken with the poet, but now swept and garnished, and with a Puritan simplicity and dignity in its poor belongings that went strangely to the heart. The widow rose from her seat at the bed's head. Herries had seen her before, but only now realised that this must be Jean Armour. With a singularly unaffected gesture of restrained and decent sorrow, she removed, in silence, the fair white linen kerchief that covered the face of her dead. Herries, with folded arms, and with a singular mixture of emotions, looked long upon the splendid mask. As in life, the dark hair swept the pallid brow, and though the glory of those eyes was quenched under the sealed lids that would lift no more, there was, in the fixed and immutable gravity of the lifeless face, a language beyond all looks, beyond all uttered speech: that air of incommunicable knowledge which, in the Dead, baffles the living with its eternal silence.
After a few minutes the widow, gently and reverently, covered the face once more.
'It was to be,' she said simply, with the quiet fatalism of her class. She turned and took from the table a packet of letters, and handed them to Herries without a word. He noted the quivering of her bloodless lip, but noted, too, the mild placidity of her wise, broad brow. Without some such element of enduring calm, never, surely, could Jean Armour have met the complicated trials of her life.
Herries took the letters from her with an almost humble reverence, and, strangely subdued in spirit, left the house and journeyed from the town.
* * * * *
As Herries, thus leaving Dumfries, turned his horse's head to the north, 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.'
'In human life there's nothing steadfast stands,Youth, Glorie, Riches fades. Death's sure at hand.'
'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 Æsculapius 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?'
'Oh, I think so, I think so!' said the good-natured man of medicine with his husky laugh. 'But I'll not tell on you ('twould hardly do, you know) in after days!' He fetched another tumbler from his cupboard and would have Herries taste with him before he went. And so the aristocratic and reserved lawyer of George Street found himself sitting in the stuffy parlour of an unknown country doctor, with a singular tumult in his blood, a new and tender anticipation at his heart, drinking to happier days.
The laird of The Mains, however, falsified the prediction of his medical attendant and lingered for nearly two years, then dying in his chair. He was gathered to his fathers in the family vault, and friends and neighbours, gathered to his funeral, noted one stranger sharing in his obsequies—a stranger to all but Alison and the old doctor. The same man, in the dusk of the evening, spoke with Alison at the little gate under the lime tree—Alison, tall and pale and sad, in a black gown. It was no moment to speak of love, but, nevertheless, these two did then, in an enforced secrecy, arrange their future. A second time would Alison leave her home, and leave it in secret. For Mrs. Graham was set upon a perverse and obstinate opposition to any marriage for her last remaining daughter, rightly estimating the loss, to her, as one of a superior and most hard-working servant. Alison, who had battled so long, had no more strength and no more courage for the fight. In a month she and Archibald Herries fled to Edinburgh town, and were married by license.
That it was a merry wedding, you are not asked to believe. For, firstly, it took place almost in the shadow of death; and then, happiness that comes after long tarrying, comes—but comes timidly—like a flower that blows too late and trembles for the storm. Yet, in the spring after, the same plant will throw out vigorous and fearless shoots. And so it was, I feel sure, with Alison and Archibald Herries. They were happy in their marriage; children were born to them in the fine George Street house, and there were gay summer migrations to the Galloway home, and all the due symbols of a rational and well-deserved prosperity. I think that to the last they were on calling—if not cordial—terms, with Clarinda, and that Willy Maclehose, grown a fine young man, was a frequent visitor at their house.
But these things are all past and gone now. Alison's children are dust, and their children, I daresay, are preparing in turn for the inevitable abdication. For so the world wags, and we live and die, and Nature renews, for each one of us, the slowly-moving pageant of joy and sorrow, of passion and of pain. But it is the RHYMER, of whatsoever generation he may be, singing of these things for us so that we all understand, who is the only Immortal.
BURNS TO CLARINDA
'Ae fond kiss and then we sever,Ae fareweel and then forever!Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,Warring sighs and groans, I'll wage thee.Who shall say that fortune grieves himWhile the star of hope she leaves him?Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me,Dark despair around benights me.'I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,Naething could resist my Nancy;But to see her was to love her;Love but her and love forever.Had we never loved sae kindly,Had we never loved sae blindly,Never met or never parted,We had ne'er been broken-hearted.'Fare thee well, thou first and fairest!Fare thee well, thou best and dearest!Thine be ilka joy and treasure,Peace, contentment, love and pleasure.Ae fond kiss and then we sever;'Ae fareweel, alas! forever.Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.'
'Ae fond kiss and then we sever,Ae fareweel and then forever!Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,Warring sighs and groans, I'll wage thee.Who shall say that fortune grieves himWhile the star of hope she leaves him?Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me,Dark despair around benights me.
'Ae fond kiss and then we sever,
Ae fareweel and then forever!
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans, I'll wage thee.
Who shall say that fortune grieves him
While the star of hope she leaves him?
Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me,
Dark despair around benights me.
'I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,Naething could resist my Nancy;But to see her was to love her;Love but her and love forever.Had we never loved sae kindly,Had we never loved sae blindly,Never met or never parted,We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
'I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,
Naething could resist my Nancy;
But to see her was to love her;
Love but her and love forever.
Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
'Fare thee well, thou first and fairest!Fare thee well, thou best and dearest!Thine be ilka joy and treasure,Peace, contentment, love and pleasure.Ae fond kiss and then we sever;'Ae fareweel, alas! forever.Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.'
'Fare thee well, thou first and fairest!
Fare thee well, thou best and dearest!
Thine be ilka joy and treasure,
Peace, contentment, love and pleasure.
Ae fond kiss and then we sever;
'Ae fareweel, alas! forever.
Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,
Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.'
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOKTHE RHYMER***