CHAPTER XXXIV.One mastering thought gave Alison's feet wings as she neared the Potterrow on her return from the Wabster's Close. She would tell Nancy of this heart-moving, this pitiful, sad scene she had witnessed, and make it plain to her at whose door the greater guilt of it all lay. Then Nancy must see reason, must lift the veil from her eyes, acknowledge the wrong-doing of the man who could cause suffering so infinite, and see her own danger in submitting to his influence. Alison, in spite of much recently-acquired experience, was still, as the perspicacious reader will perceive, very simple.Nancy was sitting writing when her messenger returned.'Well, child,' she said, 'and did you find the wench and deliver our friend's bounty?''Bounty!' cried Alison, throwing out her hands. 'She—she needs no bounty, Nancy. She's dead!'Nancy started, then tapped her foot upon the floor impatiently.'La, child,' she exclaimed, pettishly, 'how you frighten one!'But Alison was in no mood to be put off with petulance or callousness. In quick words, faltering and broken—for her eyes were wet, and her quiet, reticent nature stirred to the rare point of passionate utterance—she told what she had seen of Mysie's end.'And, oh, Nancy,' she whispered at last, on her knees at her friend's side, 'it washisdoing. She was in trouble; it washisfault. She's dead—dead! and but for him she might have been alive and happy—honest at the least.'But Nancy looked down at her face unmoved, with a little, hard smile.'Accidents will happen,' she said coolly. 'We must all die, surely. Men will be men. To talk as you do is sheer hysterics. You are a child.''I am a woman!' cried Alison, 'and I see with a woman's eyes.''You ought to concede,' Nancy continued, unmoved, 'that our friend has acted by the lass as handsomely as anyone could expect. He sent money. I've reason to know he would have acknowledged her child had the silly wench but given him the chance. He's all generosity, kindness, warmth. Didn't I give you his very words this morning—"I'd wipe the tears from all eyes if I could"?'''Twould be far better, I think,' cried Alison, 'that he should try first to cause no tears to flow. I see no beauty, Nancy, in beautiful words when cruel, heedless acts go with them.'Nancy shrugged her shoulders.'You've no understanding of a poet, Ally,' she said, with a superior and pitying air. But Alison rose to her feet, feeling a sudden courage to say that which had long burned upon her tongue.'Oh! Nancy, Nancy,' she cried, 'is it forthisman that you—''That Iwhat?' said Nancy, turning fiercely upon her friend.'That you forget,' whispered Alison, stammeringly, 'forget that you are Willy and Danny's mother, and—and—a wife, Nancy!' From cheek to brow, from her neck to her very ears, Nancy turned scarlet at the words, and her eyes blazed with anger.'Howdareyou, Alison Graham,' she said, 'how dare you say such words to me?Iforget myself—I, who remember hourly that I am bound—bound by an iron chain to an odious fate? Ah, were I free!'—she clenched her little hands, and her whole tiny frame was shaken with the vehemence of her passion, 'were I free, should I be here?—and he—he, as he is—left to the machinations of the vulgar, and driven to demean himself with filthy peasants?' She had risen, and stood over Alison, blazing with jealousy as well as rage—not jealousy of the luckless dead victim of the poet's passions, but, as it happened, of Jean Armour, of whose ascendency over the Bard she was mortally suspicious. But now she turned all the vials of her wrath on Alison.'You, to misunderstand me!' she cried. 'You, whom I have trusted, to turn again and rend me! But you are like the rest of the world—evil-minded! You read wickedness when there is only the innocence and true nobility of great minds. You are incapable of understanding friendship. I despise and rise above your mean suspicions—they are unworthy of my thoughts. But if the viper I had cherished and nursed to warmth in my bosom had turned and stung me, I could not have been more pained!' Saying which, with a toss of her head and a fine rustle of petticoats, Nancy flounced out of the room, slamming the door behind her.Poor Alison remained alone to chew the cud of this new development in her friend's mood as best she might. That Nancy should thus mount the virtuous high-horse took her inexperience totally by surprise. She conceived the figment of the 'friendship' to have long since been cast aside; but she was evidently wrong, it died a lingering death. The girl was hopelessly at sea; she began to doubt herself. Was she really evil-minded? Did she actually suspect evil where no evil was? Presently Nancy came back, her fit of anger gone, replaced by one of virtuous resignation. She kissed Alison sweetly on the cheek.'I forgive you, Ally!' she said, with the most perfect air of injured innocence. 'You are young, you do not understand! You are influenced by the cruel world! I declare I think you've been too much with Herries lately in all these tiresome visits of his, and are become infected with his horrid narrow manner of thought. Ah! be my own sweet Ally again, and we shall not quarrel.' Alison submitted to the kiss and to the reconciliation in meek bewilderment, hardly now capable of aught else.These were very sad days for Alison, for evidently Herries held himself aloof. What else, under her incriminating silence, could he do? She asked herself this, and found no answer. Yet she would listen for his footsteps on the stair, and scan the empty streets for his familiar figure—empty to her because she never met or saw him all these dreary days. One afternoon she sat alone in the little parlour—for Nancy, after a bad night, was lying down in her room. She was so deep in thought, sitting away by the little window, her hands idle over the work in her lap, that she heard nothing, and it was only when she suddenly turned round that she found her thoughts had taken visible form. Herries himself stood in the doorway.For him, too, it was a supreme moment, because he put out his whole strength against his love, and for once love conquered. He had told himself he had not come to seek Alison, and had given himself the shallow pretext of bringing his cousin's monthly money allowance. But now ... he closed the door, and in a minute his arms held Alison, and with a touch, half rough, half tender, he was pushing the darling curls from her white temples and kissing them. Yet even now they heard Nancy moving in her room, and knew they had not a moment.'Alison,' whispered Herries, hoarsely, 'I wish to God you would go home. Go home, and I will say not another word, but come and ask you from your parents.' ... But Alison pushed him from her with her arms—him, and the terrible temptation of his words.'I can't go home!' she said, and ran from the room, meeting Nancy, who entered.'Well, cousin,' the latter exclaimed, with her own undaunted sprightliness, 'here's an unexpected honour! 'Tis some time since you visited this humble roof.' But Herries turned a moody look upon his relative.'We have not come to an understanding yet on the subjects of my last visit,' he said grimly. 'But I daresay you know me too well to believe that I have been inactive in the matter. I have taken measures to prevent the visits of a certain unsuitable person to your house.''Indeed!' said Nancy, meekly, gathering up her forces for the fray, and rapidly coming to the conclusion that meekness would suit her best; if feeble as a weapon, it would at least be baffling to her adversary. Herries continued—'If you have no sense of what is fitting or unfitting for a young woman in your peculiarly delicate circumstances, others must exercise it for you. That such a man as Burns should visit your house as an intimate is worse than unfitting—it is a slur upon your reputation. He is openly a profligate, and hisbonnes fortuneswith women everywhere are become a bye-word. If you cannot protect yourself against the danger of his society, you must be protected.' Nancy had cast down her eyes and looked the image of innocence.'You are too much the master here, Archie,' she meekly said, 'and I and my poor infants are too directly dependent on your bounty for your word to be questioned. No doubt you are wise. If you have forbidden Mr. Burns my house, of course he will be forbidden.' Herries looked suspiciously at the smooth, downcast face of his cousin. He did not believe a word she said—he never did. But she baffled him.'Have you no conscience,' he said angrily, 'that you have subjected to the influence of Mr. Burns a girl like that one yonder—your guest—an inexperienced young creature committed to your charge, and for whom you are responsible? Has no thought of her ever troubled you?' Nancy assumed a little troubled air of guilt, fidgeting with the fringes of her apron.'La, Archie,' she said, 'poor Alison! Well, 'tis her sweet voice that has attracted the poet here, I may tell you that. And if she is—may be, for I've no certain knowledge of it, mind you—a little smit, what harm? Girls love these soft sensations—'tis their life. But lud, Archie! fancy talking of such things to you,' and she gave a little amused laugh. Herries looked at her with a helpless dislike. His eyes were full of a dumb and angry pain that could not get itself spoken. He had always despised this little woman—an error of judgment, for such little women are full of power, and have swayed kingdoms in their day. Now, with callous little hands, she turned the dagger in his heart. Heavens! how she made him suffer—unconsciously, it was true, but he had a bitter feeling that the will was there.'Is Miss Graham gone out?' he asked uneasily.'La! cousin, I can't tell you,' said Nancy, carelessly. 'I daresay—she's often out. I can't keep a constant dragon's eye on a great girl like that. I'm no tyrant, and she has her liberties.' Herries turned away impatiently; there was nothing to be gained in remaining with his cousin but added uneasiness. He left her house a bitterly dissatisfied and anxious man.CHAPTER XXXV.Herries's homeward way led him past the house where his partner, Creighton, lay, now in the last stages of consumptive illness. He had been there very often of late, and, more than one night, had watched beside the sick-bed until morning. During the early stages of his illness, Mr. Creighton had always asked each day for Alison, and been well satisfied with the answers which Herries gave him. But latterly these kind and eager questionings had ceased, and in increasing fever and weakness the man was gradually losing touch with the things of this life. Yet there had been a rally only that morning and the day before. A forlorn hope sprang up in Herries's heart that his partner's sagacity might help him once again. He would tell him his trouble—he would unburden himself. Creighton was a long-headed, a shrewd man, and as secret as the grave towards which he was hastening.Herries quickened his steps, and when he came to the stair he mounted it with a renewed energy in his gait. Before he reached the sick man's door he heard his voice—speaking out much more strongly than of late—and his hopes arose. Mr. Creighton was sitting up in bed, unimaginably gaunt and pale; a thin red colour made a patch on either sunk and waxen cheek, and his eyes were very bright. But, alas! when they were turned on Herries there was no recognition in them, and his loud, eager talk was the mere babble of delirium. The names upon his lips were names that Herries had never heard; they were doubtless those of the man's home and youth so resolutely put behind him, so hopelessly divided from him by the yawning gulf of some bitter, early quarrel. A woman's name he uttered so often, and with such poignant meaning, that Herries, bending over him, asked again and yet again if she were not one who could be sent for. He could not know that the earth had covered her for thirty years in that parish graveyard, away among the Pentlands, where Creighton, one evening not long since, had craved his partner to see him buried. Now his unmeaning voice went on and on, monotonous, painful, terribly sad. Herries turned away at last in bitterest silence. Creighton's dog, that crouched upon the bed, half starved, growled at his footsteps as he crossed the floor.Herries went out into the exquisite spring evening, but it brought him neither peace nor comfort. What to him were the crocus tints behind the looming castle masses? what to him the evening star that swam and shone there? In his heart were love, bitterness, and battle. Battle—for presently his enemy must return, might even now be returning, and then the tussle must begin. Herries was perfectly conscious that his letter to Robert Burns was a sheer challenge. How was he to enforce the order he had given? With what weapons could he fight a peasant? The duel would have been his remedy—easy and obvious—with an equal, but in those days men did not fight with churls. What combat of the kind was possible with a man who had never touched a sword or lifted a firearm in his life? Herries was full of fight—sharp-set, determined, coldly eager for the fray. You could see it in the steel-blue glitter of his eye, the scornful lift of eyebrow and dilation of the fine carved nostril. A game terrier, wiry with pluck, and bristling with defiance, matched against a mastiff. Such might have seemed to a sporting onlooker the chances of the fight. Alison, meanwhile, woman-like, had no excitement of a coming battle to make her forget her pain. She, too, thought of the enemy's return, but with a cold terror, feeble and helpless. In her little closet, all alone, she would lie and think, forcing the tears back into her heart.And even then he was coming—he had come—that common enemy, riding up the crowded streets upon his borrowed nag in the broad light of the lengthening day. He had ridden all the way from Dumfries by easy stages, jolly stages, most rollickingly punctuated by the flowing bowl and much good company. Thus he came in by the town gate, riding boldly for all men to see, loose rein and roving eye, king of all hearts, commander of the blood of men. The people turned to look at him, and laughed for pleasure; some called aloud, 'Guid e'en t'ye, Robbie!' while others walked at his pony's shaggy shoulder and stretched eager hands upward for his grip. So, with half the town to welcome him, came Robert Burns back to the Auld Reekie of his songs and sins.Certainly Alison's lucky star was on the wane, for Mr. Creighton died that night, and died intestate. And so she had missed a fortune and lost a friend.CHAPTER XXXVI.Burns, on this occasion, had returned to Edinburgh in what was, for him, really rather a chastened mood. His absence had been on important business, and that business had progressed to such a degree that he felt himself on the verge of a great crisis in his life, and was well minded that it should be a crisis for good and not for evil. He had surveyed the farmlands in the exquisite valley of the Nith, and had made 'a poet's, not a farmer's choice' of Elliesland, where he intended to settle forthwith and turn farmer in serious earnest. Furthermore, an appointment in the Excise had been insured to him by the interest of powerful friends, and that was another practical, sensible, wage-earning feather in his cap. Of certain interesting domestic complications at Mauchline it hardly does to speak with any degree of knowledge or understanding, but there can be little question that, at this time, there loomed large in the poet's mind some idea of an arrangement with the patient, twin-bearing Jean, which should do some tardy justice to that long-suffering female.It is fairly plain, in any case, that during his absence in the south, Sylvander had cooled considerably to his Clarinda. Not that he did not adore her still, in a proper poet's way, but he had begun to adore someone else, with practical ends in view. So matters with his fascinating little friend in the Potterrow must be brought to a pleasant conclusion. It would cause him more than a pang, but still, there must be an end to all things—the best of friends must part. He meant to remain in Edinburgh for a few days only, merely to wind up business matters with his publisher and pay a few visits of farewell. Then he would turn his back upon the capital of his triumphs and his disappointments, and turn over a new leaf in life and love.This might have happened without further hindrance, and things have settled themselves comfortably to everybody's satisfaction (except, perhaps, Clarinda's), had it not been for Herries's most unlucky and misguided letter. This awaited the poet at his lodging, under a pile of correspondence accumulated for him by his henchman Nicol. This admiring attendant of genius also awaited the arrival of Burns in his rooms, and the two spent a convivial evening of reunion. The Bard was already elevated enough in his spirits, owing to the festive nature of his journey, but it was with that kind of elevation which turns to querulousness at very slight provocation.'Here's letters enough to last a body a lifetime,' he grumbled, turning over a pile of papers, where several missives of Clarinda's lay, still unopened, it is sad to state. 'Here's a packet from some unknown,' he added; 'thick paper, and a fine crest upon the seal.' He broke it open. As he read the few lines in Herries's upright, clear-cut writing, the blood rushed in purple to his face, and he started to his feet.'Now, by all that's damnable, this is too much!' he shouted, his very eyes becoming bloodshot.'Canny, lad, canny,' said Nicol, soothingly, accustomed to the poet in his cups. 'What's up now?'But it was no mere vinous rage that held the Bard. He was touched in his tenderest and sorest points—his independence and his sense of social inferiority.'Up?' he cried, 'up? Why, here's a miserable hound of a pettifogging lawyer—a wretched, thin-blooded, whey-faced whipper-snapper that I could crush to the wall wi' the one hand o' me—has the damned impudence to infringe upon my liberties and tell me that he forbids me Mrs. Maclehose's house!' He tossed the letter to his friend, who read it with a kindling eye. Unluckily, it was couched in terms precisely those to enrage Nicol also, not merely as a partisan, but because he acridly resented the tone and attitude of a superior.'"Persons not of her station, or known to her immediate circle,"' he quoted with a sneer. 'And who is Master Herries that he writes so fine?''Am I not telling you?' cried Burns, irritably. 'A damned, pettifogging George Street writer, some cousin or guardian of my Clarinda, who, because he contributes a few paltry pence to the maintenance of her bairns, satisfies the miserable, half-inch soul of an unfeeling, cold-blooded, pitiful bigot by standing censor to everything she does that is above his dungeon bosom and foggy head! I've seen him but the once, butIknow him! Ay, and I'll know him to some purpose now, be damned to him! Here, out of my light, man! Let me go—' He had seized a cudgel from a corner of the room and apparently meditated an instant adjournment to the lawyer's premises, so armed. But Nicol interceded.'Wheesht, lad!' he urged. 'Steady a wee thing, now! Wait a bittie and see if we cannot forge some prettier mischief to Master Herries than a mere thrashing. That's like to be more of a scandal to you than to him. Trust him to have half-a-dozen lacqueys at his beck and call that would put you to the door or ever you could win by to the man. They know better, these lily-livered, dirty, skunking lawyer-bodies, than not to guard themselves well against honest men's anger.'Burns paused. Nicol's counsels had generally some weight with him, more especially when, as at the present moment, after a merry afternoon, he was not perfectly certain of his actions.'How'll I win at him? How will I touch him?' he said, flinging down the stick and frowning heavily.'You've a full right to a pretty revenge,' said his friend; 'and surely you can't want of opportunity. The gate's open to you that gives you entry to the man's very hearth.''Ay, that's true,' said Burns, with a grin, as he thought of the cosy fireside in the Potterrow.'Can't you make the fellow jealous?' said Nicol.'If he had the passions of a buck-rabbit, weel could I!' said Burns, vindictively. 'For there's his lass—I caught him with her in the dark—and then, under his very nose, I had to pay her some particularity of attention in order to put him off the scent with my Clarinda. 'Tis that muckle lass you have some grudge against yourself.''Why, then,' cried Nicol, warming to congenial mischief, 'if we cannot brew a fine broth out of this bonny concatenation, the devil take us for silly, shiftless bodies! I'm none so loth, I can tell you, to have a fling at miss for all her haughty airs. You shall pretend to love her. Write to Master Lawyer; tell him you never dreamed to lift presumptuous eyes to his worship's exquisite relative, but are contented with her governante—or whatsoever the lass is. I'm thinking that will do our trick.''Eh?' said the poet, doubtfully. He was dazed with wine, and hardly understood the nature of that which was proposed to him. Nicol got the ink-pot, a sheet of paper, and a pen, which he thrust into his friend's somewhat unsteady hand.'Write, now,' he began eagerly—'something in this style: "Honoured sir"—(letters in the third person are so damnably difficult to put, I can't away with them!)—"Honoured sir: I am in due receipt of your late favour, which hath awaited me at my lodging this long time in my absence on a journey. I crave your pardon for this delay in answering the same. I also crave your patience for offence given in the matter of my visits to the house of your honourable cousin, Mistress Maclehose. But sure, sir, you were not so mistaken, on the one occasion that we met there, as to confuse the object of my attention with any other. It was most assuredly not—as, sir, you might have seen—your honour's relative, who, in truth, is far above my sphere, but the young female abiding with her at this time. And I would humbly beg of your kindness not to interrupt this little affair of an honourable affection, which is like to be in a fair way to become reciprocal...."''"Reciprocal"!' said Burns, pausing, with a confused laugh. 'Man, but that's a muckle lee! The lass hates me, sure's death—I know not why.''Then serve her right the more,' said Nicol, now bent upon mischief. He had a peculiar leaning to the coarse, practical joke, and was entirely callous to the sufferings of his victims in such cases, even had they done nothing to provoke his spite. The Bard looked yet a little doubtful, and bungled over the letter. Had he been perfectly sober, it is unlikely that he would have lent himself to a device so mean and cowardly. Actions of this kind were not natural to him by any means, for, at anyrate, where men were concerned, he was honest and straightforward in his dealings. But Nicol poured a stream of specious arguments into his buzzing ears; all was fair in love and war—and this was both—and all that his letter, at the worst, would lead to was a lover's quarrel, which would doubtless be patched up far sooner than the delinquents at all deserved. Thus cajoled, the poet finished and folded up the letter, and consented to its dispatch.Then he fell to brooding over Herries's note again, and over that clearness came to him on one point at anyrate. For to this hot-blooded son of Adam the high-handed prohibition it contained was fuel added to his flame. He had all but virtuously resolved to cut matters short with his Clarinda; but now that resolution went to the four winds, and a very different one sprang into determination in its place. He scrawled a letter to the Potterrow, to which both wine and passion lent a warmth he had hardly yet dared to express. And Nicol sallied forth with both epistles—this time, in spite of the lateness of the hour, with no complaints.CHAPTER XXXVII.Mrs. Maclehose, on the following evening, stood in the window of her little room, lost in agitating thought. The poet's impassioned letter was in the bosom of her dress, and seemed to burn her, but with a delicious pain. At almost any other juncture of her commerce with the man it would have frightened her; for the little woman, in spite of her impetuosity, had some obscure element of the national caution in her nature. But now she was in a state when caution must give way to the fiercer and more primitive passions. For nearly three weeks now she had suffered a frenzy of jealous love, and during the absence of her friend, as she called him, was not only tortured with a longing for the sight of him, but also with horrible fears of his infidelity. She had pictured him as returned within the sphere of the influence of Jean Armour—a person she insisted upon regarding as a low-minded, artful hussy with designs upon the Bard. License to almost any degree she would allow the man, whose nature she made allowances for with an amazing liberality; it was the idea of matrimony she dreaded with an anguish of jealous dread. But the poet's letter had brought ample reassurance: he was returned to his Clarinda, more in love with her—more impassioned, than when he went away. He implored for an interview that night, but it must be private. He had matters to discuss of the utmost importance, but they were for her ear alone. He conjured her, by all that was most sacred in love and friendship, to let no third person intrude upon the happiness of their first reunion. Well ... she would not tell Alison that he came, and Alison would go to bed: that was all. But then, the girl slept so light, and had an ear so sensitive ... she must, in that confined space, hear voices...? Nancy knit her soft brows, and behind them, her busy, tortuous little brain made plans.Alison had been out of doors with Willy that afternoon, and returned somewhat late. It was a blustering spring evening, with a shrewd edge to the wind, and when the girl came into the parlour at the late tea-time there was an unquestionable redness about her eyelids. Alas! it was not the wind that smirched her fair good looks, but tears. For poor Alison, in these days, would cry a little, uncomforted, in her closet, choking back the tears.'Why, Ally, you have got the cold!' said Nancy. 'I can see it in your eyes.' Alison turned quickly from the light.'I never get the cold,' she said. But Nancy insisted, and harped upon the ailment—she was convinced that Alison had an influenza coming.'When you go to bed, which I'd have you do early, love,' she said purringly, 'I'll give you something that will check the horrid thing. A few drops ofaqua vitæin water are infallible at an early stage.' Healthy Alison, who took no medicine stuff, would stoutly have rebelled at any other time, but now she was anxious to divert attention from her red eyes, and promised to take the remedy. When bedtime came, Nancy bade her undress and get into her bed and she would bring her the dose with her own hands.She was away some little time in her own room, and Alison heard the clink of glass against glass as she prepared the decoction. Water had gone into it, and a few drops of theaqua vitæ, which turned the water into an opaque whiteness. And then Nancy had paused and looked round her with a guilty look. She took another bottle from the shelf beside her bed, and measured a portion of its contents into the half-full wine glass. It was her own sleeping draught—a half dose.It must not for an instant be supposed that there was anything of the villain in Nancy's composition, or that she intended to do her friend the smallest injury. She well knew that the sleeping draught was of the mildest order—a perfectly harmless drug, as the physician had positively assured her. And she put in only the half dose. Nevertheless, as she carried it into the girl's room, and gave it to her, it was with an averted look. She could not bear to meet Alison's eyes, and her little hand so shook that a part of the liquid was spilt upon the sheet. Then she hurriedly kissed her friend, put out the light, and left her.Alison lay awake some time, for, upon perfectly healthy nerves, a sleeping draught will occasionally have the reverse of its intended effect. She seemed to get a headache and to become restless. She heard Nancy's movements in her room with peculiar distinctness, and supposed that her friend was preparing for bed. In reality, the deluded little woman was changing her dress from a common to a dainty one—adding, in every ribbon and coaxed trick of curl, to the danger that awaited her—moving furtively, with many a pause, to listen if Alison stirred, or Jean in the attic above. Then a kind of buzzing drowsiness came over Alison—disagreeable, because she seemed to want to fight against it. But it overcame her; and then for some hours she did certainly sleep, and much more heavily than was her wont.When she awoke, it was with a confused, unpleasant feeling, and the sound of voices in her ears. The room was dark, but a line of light showed under the door. Alison sat up and listened. A curious, nightmare-like sense of danger was upon her, indefinably oppressive. Her ears were acute. She heard Nancy's voice, and a man's voice, unmistakably. Clearness came to her, though her temples throbbed and the drug she had been given buzzed in her head. She slipped to the floor, searched for, but could not find her shoes, groped for her wrapper, and threw it over her shoulders. She crept to the door and lifted the latch noiselessly.The passage lamp was out, but the parlour was in a glow of brightness. The door had swung open with its old trick, and a stream of light came from it. In brilliant relief the little room and all it held stood out. And, in the circle of light, unconscious of all save each other, they stood—the tempter and the tempted. And behind Alison the big wag-at-the-wall clock, with a guilty twang, struck one.One of Robert Burns's great labouring hands was clenched, and he leaned heavily on the table with it. Alison could see the veins in it throb and swell with the hot, ungovernable blood. His other arm held Nancy—Nancy, whose little trembling hands covered her face—and who turned, as Alison watched her, to hide it against the man's powerful shoulder. The poet's face was in shadow, for it was bent over the woman. He spoke, but his voice was low and thick; Alison could not catch the words.She only looked at them a moment, just till the clock struck. Then they moved with a start, and she also moved forward, until she too stood in the circle of light. Petrified, the lovers saw her both at once,—staring, chapfallen, as though they beheld a spirit: only a girl, indeed, with bare feet, and in her nightgown, sleep still in her wide eyes and curls scattered on her shoulders, but hedged about with the immutable dignity of innocence, and strong with the strength of right. She walked straight up to Nancy, and with a little jerk of effort took her into her own arms from the man's embrace, facing him boldly.'It is too late for visitors here, sir,' she said simply. 'Mrs. Maclehose would have you go.'The poet's arms dropped to his side and his jaw fell. His sun-browned face had become quite pale, and the words which stammered on his lips would not get themselves spoken. When he moved it was to fumble for his hat. Then he made for the door, without a look or word for those he left; and it might be said that he slunk, then and there, from the room and from the house.Nancy had slipped from Alison's arms and lay on the floor in a little huddled heap, moaning. Alison tried to raise her, but she would not rise.'Come, Nancy, come to bed,' whispered the girl. 'You are cold—you are shaking.' She lifted her, and then Nancy stood up, staring round her with miserable, unseeing eyes—deadly pale, and utterly dishevelled.'I—I slipped,' she said, in a curious dazed way. 'I—slipped—and nearly fell, Ally.''Here's my hand,' said Alison. And then, half leading and half carrying her, the girl took the wretched little woman to her bed.CHAPTER XXXVIII.Alison watched all night long beside her friend. Nancy never let go her hand, but lay holding it, at first in a kind of wretched stupor, staring straight before her, with dry, miserable eyes; then in a sort of palsy of convulsive shivering, and at last in a fit of hysterical weeping, so violent that it seemed to tear her little frame to pieces. Alison soothed and comforted her as best she could, but at first neither peace nor comfort came. The girl's own thoughts were full of bewilderment. Here, in truth, was love—a creature shaken by it through all the innermost places of her being. Alison, too, loved—but then, how differently! Was it the same passion—this, that destroyed her friend, and that which raised her own soul to heights never dreamed of before she had known Herries? Presently Nancy fell into the light doze of sheer exhaustion, and Alison was able to go and dress herself.But her troubles were by no means over, for Nancy awoke to a plight most piteous—a mental condition almost impossible to cope with. Like one, who, saved from some horrible fate by accident or misadventure, is haunted by phantasmal death in every form, so Nancy, with the tremendous recoil of every natural womanly feeling, beheld herself, again and yet again, on the verge of the great and terrible abyss from which she had been so narrowly and so barely saved. Her mind clung now, with the painful obstinacy and insistence of hysteria, to every symbol and outward sign of safety. Could these stumbling steps of hers be hid? Could she resume, before the men and women of her world, the steady gait of blameless womanhood? With words that harrowed Alison's very soul, she protested her actual innocence, while she bemoaned the folly that had made her risk her reputation. Oh, she had been mad—blind—headstrong! She saw it all now.'All my life, Ally,' she said, her sweet voice roughened with long crying—'all my life I've been guided by the impulse of the moment. My passion has done what it will with me, and now it has undone me utterly.' Then she fell to harping on the theme of secrecy. Was there anyone who would betray her? How much did Jean know, and did she gossip? And Alison—Alison, who knew all—oh, was she sure of herself? Would she never—never by word, or look, or sign—betray her friend?'Will you swear to me, Ally, that you'll never tell?' cried Nancy, raising herself in bed. 'I'd be easier if you'd swear upon the Bible never to betray me!''Nay,' said Alison, proudly, 'I'll not swear. Have I ever lied to you that you should ask an oath? But I'll promise you, Nancy, by all you've been to me, and done for me, that no word of mine shall ever tell your secret to any human being.' Nancy sank back among her pillows with a sigh of relief.'Then I'm safe,' she said, 'forhewill never betray me; to kiss and tell is not his nature. He is all the noblest generosity! Don't think my love is dead, Ally,' she added in something of her old tones. 'It lives, and it will live, purified. I'll tear the earthly part of it from my heart, and live in hopes that we may meet in heaven!' Soothed by this interesting and sanguine reflection, Nancy grew calmer. She took a little of her sleeping medicine, and Alison was just beginning to look forward to an hour of peace, when she awoke with a scream. 'Oh, God!' she cried aloud, 'my key!''Hush, Nancy; Jean will hear you,' said Alison, patiently. 'What key?''My key,' reiterated Nancy, working herself up into a passion of terror; 'my house key. Oh! fool that I was! I gave it to him in all innocence: it was before your own eyes, Alison, and only to save Jean when she was throng. It has an ivory label to it, with my name and the street's name, and if it is found with him I am undone—undone!' She twined her fingers in her hair and would have torn it but that Alison held her hands. Alison herself looked blank enough; the matter of the key struck her as a bad business, incriminating evidence enough in the hands of such a man as Burns—careless, if he was not malicious, and, like all men, leaving things about. 'Ally, as you love me, you must go and get it from him!' said Nancy; 'I'll not trust the matter upon paper. I must have a messenger, and that messenger must be you.''Nay, but that's too much!' cried Alison, turning white.'Too much?' said Nancy, piteously. 'Too much to save your friend whom you have promised to save? Oh, Ally, pity me—pity me—and go!' She put up her trembling arms and caught Alison about the neck, clinging to her.'If I go,' said poor Alison, desperately, 'will you promise me one thing, Nancy—never, never to send me on another message to this man?''Never! I swear!' cried Nancy. 'Oh, Ally, I've been wrong to do it so often, most hideously selfish and wrong so to have used your good-nature. But you'll forgive me, for I knew not what I did!'Alison met the inevitable with a kind of cold, white calm. Her very flesh shrank from the thought of meeting Burns, of being near him and breathing the same air. Now she must not only go to his house, but in all probability enter it, doing that which, to anyone not acquainted with the intricacies of the affair and her own obscure part in it, was, on the face of it, open to the gravest misconstruction. Should Herries know of it—what then? But a kind of despair had come to Alison on this point. She must do what she had to do; it was all a ghastly mistake, a growing and intolerable injustice, but she must blunder on with it now. She was the same Alison, and in the same mood, who had desperately promised in Jacky's twilight nursery, weeks ago, to marry Mr. Cheape because duty drove her to it, and she saw no other way.It was agreed that she should wait till nearly dusk before setting out, and it was, perhaps, five or six o'clock before she left the house. She hurried through the familiar streets, choosing the obscurer ones, and keeping in the shadow—haunted by a sense of the guilt which was not hers. She stood at last before the odiously familiar door in St. James's Square, and knocked. It was opened to her by Nicol, and Alison's flesh crept, for she loathed the man, and feared him now—she knew not why.'Is Mr. Burns within?' she asked in a low voice. Nicol looked her up and down with an indescribable insolence.'No, mistress,' he said, 'he's not.''Will he be in soon?' Alison forced herself to ask.'Are you that anxious to see him?' said Nicol, with a leer. Alison drew herself up, with a passionate scorn, though she trembled in every limb.'I have important business with Mr. Burns,' she faltered, 'and desire an interview.''Ay, oh, ay, I understand!' said Nicol. 'Well, mistress, come in and wait. Rob's door is never closed to bonny lasses.' He held the door wide. Behind his uncouth figure opened a vista of dingy passage, ending in a stair. Alison hesitated, half drew back; to cross that threshold was horrible to her; it seemed to put her in the power of men—of bad men. She held her hand to her heart—it fluttered so—and cast a longing look down the empty street. Oh, for some help! But no help came.'If there is some room where I could wait—alone' ... she began, with an unlucky inflection on the last word, which Nicol's ear caught, and bitterly resented.'Oh, ay, there's a room where you can be private,' answered Nicol, with suspicious blandness. 'Come up the stair.' He led the way, and Alison followed in the close, malodorous darkness.Burns occupied two rooms on the first floor of the house, a parlour and sleeping-closet communicating. It was into the former of these that Nicol ushered Alison—a disorderly and ill-kept room, with a bottle and glasses on the table, and articles of a man's wearing apparel strewn about upon the chairs and floor.''Tis no room for a fine miss like you,' said Nicol, with dangerous politeness. 'I'll take it upon myself to usher you into our sanctum sanctorum—'tis more genteel.''But if this is the parlour,' said Alison, looking round her nervously, and perhaps beginning a little to lose her head, 'if this is the parlour, had I not better remain here?''No, no,' said Nicol, speciously, 'we have the other—much more private. Here anyone may come at any moment, you see, and if your business is private—' It was a touch of devilish cunning, for terror seized Alison at the thought of an intrusion.'If, then, you think it wiser—' she said, looking about her with startled eyes.'Ay, come away—much wiser'—said Nicol. 'See here!' He held open the door of the inner room—its only entrance—and Alison walked in. The moment her feet were over the threshold, Nicol slammed-to the door upon her, and locked it with a loud report.'There, my bonny bird!' he called, his grinning mouth to the panel; 'we've got you safe and sound! Are ye "alone" enough in there for your taste? 'Od, it's there you'll bide till Rob comes hame and lets ye out!' He exploded in a fit of laughter; here was a piece of horse-play after his own heart.Stunned and stupid, Alison had tottered a few steps into the inner room. A bed in the corner, unmade since the morning, showed that it was the poet's sleeping chamber. And she was trapped beyond all possibility of escape.
CHAPTER XXXIV.
One mastering thought gave Alison's feet wings as she neared the Potterrow on her return from the Wabster's Close. She would tell Nancy of this heart-moving, this pitiful, sad scene she had witnessed, and make it plain to her at whose door the greater guilt of it all lay. Then Nancy must see reason, must lift the veil from her eyes, acknowledge the wrong-doing of the man who could cause suffering so infinite, and see her own danger in submitting to his influence. Alison, in spite of much recently-acquired experience, was still, as the perspicacious reader will perceive, very simple.
Nancy was sitting writing when her messenger returned.
'Well, child,' she said, 'and did you find the wench and deliver our friend's bounty?'
'Bounty!' cried Alison, throwing out her hands. 'She—she needs no bounty, Nancy. She's dead!'
Nancy started, then tapped her foot upon the floor impatiently.
'La, child,' she exclaimed, pettishly, 'how you frighten one!'
But Alison was in no mood to be put off with petulance or callousness. In quick words, faltering and broken—for her eyes were wet, and her quiet, reticent nature stirred to the rare point of passionate utterance—she told what she had seen of Mysie's end.
'And, oh, Nancy,' she whispered at last, on her knees at her friend's side, 'it washisdoing. She was in trouble; it washisfault. She's dead—dead! and but for him she might have been alive and happy—honest at the least.'
But Nancy looked down at her face unmoved, with a little, hard smile.
'Accidents will happen,' she said coolly. 'We must all die, surely. Men will be men. To talk as you do is sheer hysterics. You are a child.'
'I am a woman!' cried Alison, 'and I see with a woman's eyes.'
'You ought to concede,' Nancy continued, unmoved, 'that our friend has acted by the lass as handsomely as anyone could expect. He sent money. I've reason to know he would have acknowledged her child had the silly wench but given him the chance. He's all generosity, kindness, warmth. Didn't I give you his very words this morning—"I'd wipe the tears from all eyes if I could"?'
''Twould be far better, I think,' cried Alison, 'that he should try first to cause no tears to flow. I see no beauty, Nancy, in beautiful words when cruel, heedless acts go with them.'
Nancy shrugged her shoulders.
'You've no understanding of a poet, Ally,' she said, with a superior and pitying air. But Alison rose to her feet, feeling a sudden courage to say that which had long burned upon her tongue.
'Oh! Nancy, Nancy,' she cried, 'is it forthisman that you—'
'That Iwhat?' said Nancy, turning fiercely upon her friend.
'That you forget,' whispered Alison, stammeringly, 'forget that you are Willy and Danny's mother, and—and—a wife, Nancy!' From cheek to brow, from her neck to her very ears, Nancy turned scarlet at the words, and her eyes blazed with anger.
'Howdareyou, Alison Graham,' she said, 'how dare you say such words to me?Iforget myself—I, who remember hourly that I am bound—bound by an iron chain to an odious fate? Ah, were I free!'—she clenched her little hands, and her whole tiny frame was shaken with the vehemence of her passion, 'were I free, should I be here?—and he—he, as he is—left to the machinations of the vulgar, and driven to demean himself with filthy peasants?' She had risen, and stood over Alison, blazing with jealousy as well as rage—not jealousy of the luckless dead victim of the poet's passions, but, as it happened, of Jean Armour, of whose ascendency over the Bard she was mortally suspicious. But now she turned all the vials of her wrath on Alison.
'You, to misunderstand me!' she cried. 'You, whom I have trusted, to turn again and rend me! But you are like the rest of the world—evil-minded! You read wickedness when there is only the innocence and true nobility of great minds. You are incapable of understanding friendship. I despise and rise above your mean suspicions—they are unworthy of my thoughts. But if the viper I had cherished and nursed to warmth in my bosom had turned and stung me, I could not have been more pained!' Saying which, with a toss of her head and a fine rustle of petticoats, Nancy flounced out of the room, slamming the door behind her.
Poor Alison remained alone to chew the cud of this new development in her friend's mood as best she might. That Nancy should thus mount the virtuous high-horse took her inexperience totally by surprise. She conceived the figment of the 'friendship' to have long since been cast aside; but she was evidently wrong, it died a lingering death. The girl was hopelessly at sea; she began to doubt herself. Was she really evil-minded? Did she actually suspect evil where no evil was? Presently Nancy came back, her fit of anger gone, replaced by one of virtuous resignation. She kissed Alison sweetly on the cheek.
'I forgive you, Ally!' she said, with the most perfect air of injured innocence. 'You are young, you do not understand! You are influenced by the cruel world! I declare I think you've been too much with Herries lately in all these tiresome visits of his, and are become infected with his horrid narrow manner of thought. Ah! be my own sweet Ally again, and we shall not quarrel.' Alison submitted to the kiss and to the reconciliation in meek bewilderment, hardly now capable of aught else.
These were very sad days for Alison, for evidently Herries held himself aloof. What else, under her incriminating silence, could he do? She asked herself this, and found no answer. Yet she would listen for his footsteps on the stair, and scan the empty streets for his familiar figure—empty to her because she never met or saw him all these dreary days. One afternoon she sat alone in the little parlour—for Nancy, after a bad night, was lying down in her room. She was so deep in thought, sitting away by the little window, her hands idle over the work in her lap, that she heard nothing, and it was only when she suddenly turned round that she found her thoughts had taken visible form. Herries himself stood in the doorway.
For him, too, it was a supreme moment, because he put out his whole strength against his love, and for once love conquered. He had told himself he had not come to seek Alison, and had given himself the shallow pretext of bringing his cousin's monthly money allowance. But now ... he closed the door, and in a minute his arms held Alison, and with a touch, half rough, half tender, he was pushing the darling curls from her white temples and kissing them. Yet even now they heard Nancy moving in her room, and knew they had not a moment.
'Alison,' whispered Herries, hoarsely, 'I wish to God you would go home. Go home, and I will say not another word, but come and ask you from your parents.' ... But Alison pushed him from her with her arms—him, and the terrible temptation of his words.
'I can't go home!' she said, and ran from the room, meeting Nancy, who entered.
'Well, cousin,' the latter exclaimed, with her own undaunted sprightliness, 'here's an unexpected honour! 'Tis some time since you visited this humble roof.' But Herries turned a moody look upon his relative.
'We have not come to an understanding yet on the subjects of my last visit,' he said grimly. 'But I daresay you know me too well to believe that I have been inactive in the matter. I have taken measures to prevent the visits of a certain unsuitable person to your house.'
'Indeed!' said Nancy, meekly, gathering up her forces for the fray, and rapidly coming to the conclusion that meekness would suit her best; if feeble as a weapon, it would at least be baffling to her adversary. Herries continued—
'If you have no sense of what is fitting or unfitting for a young woman in your peculiarly delicate circumstances, others must exercise it for you. That such a man as Burns should visit your house as an intimate is worse than unfitting—it is a slur upon your reputation. He is openly a profligate, and hisbonnes fortuneswith women everywhere are become a bye-word. If you cannot protect yourself against the danger of his society, you must be protected.' Nancy had cast down her eyes and looked the image of innocence.
'You are too much the master here, Archie,' she meekly said, 'and I and my poor infants are too directly dependent on your bounty for your word to be questioned. No doubt you are wise. If you have forbidden Mr. Burns my house, of course he will be forbidden.' Herries looked suspiciously at the smooth, downcast face of his cousin. He did not believe a word she said—he never did. But she baffled him.
'Have you no conscience,' he said angrily, 'that you have subjected to the influence of Mr. Burns a girl like that one yonder—your guest—an inexperienced young creature committed to your charge, and for whom you are responsible? Has no thought of her ever troubled you?' Nancy assumed a little troubled air of guilt, fidgeting with the fringes of her apron.
'La, Archie,' she said, 'poor Alison! Well, 'tis her sweet voice that has attracted the poet here, I may tell you that. And if she is—may be, for I've no certain knowledge of it, mind you—a little smit, what harm? Girls love these soft sensations—'tis their life. But lud, Archie! fancy talking of such things to you,' and she gave a little amused laugh. Herries looked at her with a helpless dislike. His eyes were full of a dumb and angry pain that could not get itself spoken. He had always despised this little woman—an error of judgment, for such little women are full of power, and have swayed kingdoms in their day. Now, with callous little hands, she turned the dagger in his heart. Heavens! how she made him suffer—unconsciously, it was true, but he had a bitter feeling that the will was there.
'Is Miss Graham gone out?' he asked uneasily.
'La! cousin, I can't tell you,' said Nancy, carelessly. 'I daresay—she's often out. I can't keep a constant dragon's eye on a great girl like that. I'm no tyrant, and she has her liberties.' Herries turned away impatiently; there was nothing to be gained in remaining with his cousin but added uneasiness. He left her house a bitterly dissatisfied and anxious man.
CHAPTER XXXV.
Herries's homeward way led him past the house where his partner, Creighton, lay, now in the last stages of consumptive illness. He had been there very often of late, and, more than one night, had watched beside the sick-bed until morning. During the early stages of his illness, Mr. Creighton had always asked each day for Alison, and been well satisfied with the answers which Herries gave him. But latterly these kind and eager questionings had ceased, and in increasing fever and weakness the man was gradually losing touch with the things of this life. Yet there had been a rally only that morning and the day before. A forlorn hope sprang up in Herries's heart that his partner's sagacity might help him once again. He would tell him his trouble—he would unburden himself. Creighton was a long-headed, a shrewd man, and as secret as the grave towards which he was hastening.
Herries quickened his steps, and when he came to the stair he mounted it with a renewed energy in his gait. Before he reached the sick man's door he heard his voice—speaking out much more strongly than of late—and his hopes arose. Mr. Creighton was sitting up in bed, unimaginably gaunt and pale; a thin red colour made a patch on either sunk and waxen cheek, and his eyes were very bright. But, alas! when they were turned on Herries there was no recognition in them, and his loud, eager talk was the mere babble of delirium. The names upon his lips were names that Herries had never heard; they were doubtless those of the man's home and youth so resolutely put behind him, so hopelessly divided from him by the yawning gulf of some bitter, early quarrel. A woman's name he uttered so often, and with such poignant meaning, that Herries, bending over him, asked again and yet again if she were not one who could be sent for. He could not know that the earth had covered her for thirty years in that parish graveyard, away among the Pentlands, where Creighton, one evening not long since, had craved his partner to see him buried. Now his unmeaning voice went on and on, monotonous, painful, terribly sad. Herries turned away at last in bitterest silence. Creighton's dog, that crouched upon the bed, half starved, growled at his footsteps as he crossed the floor.
Herries went out into the exquisite spring evening, but it brought him neither peace nor comfort. What to him were the crocus tints behind the looming castle masses? what to him the evening star that swam and shone there? In his heart were love, bitterness, and battle. Battle—for presently his enemy must return, might even now be returning, and then the tussle must begin. Herries was perfectly conscious that his letter to Robert Burns was a sheer challenge. How was he to enforce the order he had given? With what weapons could he fight a peasant? The duel would have been his remedy—easy and obvious—with an equal, but in those days men did not fight with churls. What combat of the kind was possible with a man who had never touched a sword or lifted a firearm in his life? Herries was full of fight—sharp-set, determined, coldly eager for the fray. You could see it in the steel-blue glitter of his eye, the scornful lift of eyebrow and dilation of the fine carved nostril. A game terrier, wiry with pluck, and bristling with defiance, matched against a mastiff. Such might have seemed to a sporting onlooker the chances of the fight. Alison, meanwhile, woman-like, had no excitement of a coming battle to make her forget her pain. She, too, thought of the enemy's return, but with a cold terror, feeble and helpless. In her little closet, all alone, she would lie and think, forcing the tears back into her heart.
And even then he was coming—he had come—that common enemy, riding up the crowded streets upon his borrowed nag in the broad light of the lengthening day. He had ridden all the way from Dumfries by easy stages, jolly stages, most rollickingly punctuated by the flowing bowl and much good company. Thus he came in by the town gate, riding boldly for all men to see, loose rein and roving eye, king of all hearts, commander of the blood of men. The people turned to look at him, and laughed for pleasure; some called aloud, 'Guid e'en t'ye, Robbie!' while others walked at his pony's shaggy shoulder and stretched eager hands upward for his grip. So, with half the town to welcome him, came Robert Burns back to the Auld Reekie of his songs and sins.
Certainly Alison's lucky star was on the wane, for Mr. Creighton died that night, and died intestate. And so she had missed a fortune and lost a friend.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Burns, on this occasion, had returned to Edinburgh in what was, for him, really rather a chastened mood. His absence had been on important business, and that business had progressed to such a degree that he felt himself on the verge of a great crisis in his life, and was well minded that it should be a crisis for good and not for evil. He had surveyed the farmlands in the exquisite valley of the Nith, and had made 'a poet's, not a farmer's choice' of Elliesland, where he intended to settle forthwith and turn farmer in serious earnest. Furthermore, an appointment in the Excise had been insured to him by the interest of powerful friends, and that was another practical, sensible, wage-earning feather in his cap. Of certain interesting domestic complications at Mauchline it hardly does to speak with any degree of knowledge or understanding, but there can be little question that, at this time, there loomed large in the poet's mind some idea of an arrangement with the patient, twin-bearing Jean, which should do some tardy justice to that long-suffering female.
It is fairly plain, in any case, that during his absence in the south, Sylvander had cooled considerably to his Clarinda. Not that he did not adore her still, in a proper poet's way, but he had begun to adore someone else, with practical ends in view. So matters with his fascinating little friend in the Potterrow must be brought to a pleasant conclusion. It would cause him more than a pang, but still, there must be an end to all things—the best of friends must part. He meant to remain in Edinburgh for a few days only, merely to wind up business matters with his publisher and pay a few visits of farewell. Then he would turn his back upon the capital of his triumphs and his disappointments, and turn over a new leaf in life and love.
This might have happened without further hindrance, and things have settled themselves comfortably to everybody's satisfaction (except, perhaps, Clarinda's), had it not been for Herries's most unlucky and misguided letter. This awaited the poet at his lodging, under a pile of correspondence accumulated for him by his henchman Nicol. This admiring attendant of genius also awaited the arrival of Burns in his rooms, and the two spent a convivial evening of reunion. The Bard was already elevated enough in his spirits, owing to the festive nature of his journey, but it was with that kind of elevation which turns to querulousness at very slight provocation.
'Here's letters enough to last a body a lifetime,' he grumbled, turning over a pile of papers, where several missives of Clarinda's lay, still unopened, it is sad to state. 'Here's a packet from some unknown,' he added; 'thick paper, and a fine crest upon the seal.' He broke it open. As he read the few lines in Herries's upright, clear-cut writing, the blood rushed in purple to his face, and he started to his feet.
'Now, by all that's damnable, this is too much!' he shouted, his very eyes becoming bloodshot.
'Canny, lad, canny,' said Nicol, soothingly, accustomed to the poet in his cups. 'What's up now?'
But it was no mere vinous rage that held the Bard. He was touched in his tenderest and sorest points—his independence and his sense of social inferiority.
'Up?' he cried, 'up? Why, here's a miserable hound of a pettifogging lawyer—a wretched, thin-blooded, whey-faced whipper-snapper that I could crush to the wall wi' the one hand o' me—has the damned impudence to infringe upon my liberties and tell me that he forbids me Mrs. Maclehose's house!' He tossed the letter to his friend, who read it with a kindling eye. Unluckily, it was couched in terms precisely those to enrage Nicol also, not merely as a partisan, but because he acridly resented the tone and attitude of a superior.
'"Persons not of her station, or known to her immediate circle,"' he quoted with a sneer. 'And who is Master Herries that he writes so fine?'
'Am I not telling you?' cried Burns, irritably. 'A damned, pettifogging George Street writer, some cousin or guardian of my Clarinda, who, because he contributes a few paltry pence to the maintenance of her bairns, satisfies the miserable, half-inch soul of an unfeeling, cold-blooded, pitiful bigot by standing censor to everything she does that is above his dungeon bosom and foggy head! I've seen him but the once, butIknow him! Ay, and I'll know him to some purpose now, be damned to him! Here, out of my light, man! Let me go—' He had seized a cudgel from a corner of the room and apparently meditated an instant adjournment to the lawyer's premises, so armed. But Nicol interceded.
'Wheesht, lad!' he urged. 'Steady a wee thing, now! Wait a bittie and see if we cannot forge some prettier mischief to Master Herries than a mere thrashing. That's like to be more of a scandal to you than to him. Trust him to have half-a-dozen lacqueys at his beck and call that would put you to the door or ever you could win by to the man. They know better, these lily-livered, dirty, skunking lawyer-bodies, than not to guard themselves well against honest men's anger.'
Burns paused. Nicol's counsels had generally some weight with him, more especially when, as at the present moment, after a merry afternoon, he was not perfectly certain of his actions.
'How'll I win at him? How will I touch him?' he said, flinging down the stick and frowning heavily.
'You've a full right to a pretty revenge,' said his friend; 'and surely you can't want of opportunity. The gate's open to you that gives you entry to the man's very hearth.'
'Ay, that's true,' said Burns, with a grin, as he thought of the cosy fireside in the Potterrow.
'Can't you make the fellow jealous?' said Nicol.
'If he had the passions of a buck-rabbit, weel could I!' said Burns, vindictively. 'For there's his lass—I caught him with her in the dark—and then, under his very nose, I had to pay her some particularity of attention in order to put him off the scent with my Clarinda. 'Tis that muckle lass you have some grudge against yourself.'
'Why, then,' cried Nicol, warming to congenial mischief, 'if we cannot brew a fine broth out of this bonny concatenation, the devil take us for silly, shiftless bodies! I'm none so loth, I can tell you, to have a fling at miss for all her haughty airs. You shall pretend to love her. Write to Master Lawyer; tell him you never dreamed to lift presumptuous eyes to his worship's exquisite relative, but are contented with her governante—or whatsoever the lass is. I'm thinking that will do our trick.'
'Eh?' said the poet, doubtfully. He was dazed with wine, and hardly understood the nature of that which was proposed to him. Nicol got the ink-pot, a sheet of paper, and a pen, which he thrust into his friend's somewhat unsteady hand.
'Write, now,' he began eagerly—'something in this style: "Honoured sir"—(letters in the third person are so damnably difficult to put, I can't away with them!)—"Honoured sir: I am in due receipt of your late favour, which hath awaited me at my lodging this long time in my absence on a journey. I crave your pardon for this delay in answering the same. I also crave your patience for offence given in the matter of my visits to the house of your honourable cousin, Mistress Maclehose. But sure, sir, you were not so mistaken, on the one occasion that we met there, as to confuse the object of my attention with any other. It was most assuredly not—as, sir, you might have seen—your honour's relative, who, in truth, is far above my sphere, but the young female abiding with her at this time. And I would humbly beg of your kindness not to interrupt this little affair of an honourable affection, which is like to be in a fair way to become reciprocal...."'
'"Reciprocal"!' said Burns, pausing, with a confused laugh. 'Man, but that's a muckle lee! The lass hates me, sure's death—I know not why.'
'Then serve her right the more,' said Nicol, now bent upon mischief. He had a peculiar leaning to the coarse, practical joke, and was entirely callous to the sufferings of his victims in such cases, even had they done nothing to provoke his spite. The Bard looked yet a little doubtful, and bungled over the letter. Had he been perfectly sober, it is unlikely that he would have lent himself to a device so mean and cowardly. Actions of this kind were not natural to him by any means, for, at anyrate, where men were concerned, he was honest and straightforward in his dealings. But Nicol poured a stream of specious arguments into his buzzing ears; all was fair in love and war—and this was both—and all that his letter, at the worst, would lead to was a lover's quarrel, which would doubtless be patched up far sooner than the delinquents at all deserved. Thus cajoled, the poet finished and folded up the letter, and consented to its dispatch.
Then he fell to brooding over Herries's note again, and over that clearness came to him on one point at anyrate. For to this hot-blooded son of Adam the high-handed prohibition it contained was fuel added to his flame. He had all but virtuously resolved to cut matters short with his Clarinda; but now that resolution went to the four winds, and a very different one sprang into determination in its place. He scrawled a letter to the Potterrow, to which both wine and passion lent a warmth he had hardly yet dared to express. And Nicol sallied forth with both epistles—this time, in spite of the lateness of the hour, with no complaints.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
Mrs. Maclehose, on the following evening, stood in the window of her little room, lost in agitating thought. The poet's impassioned letter was in the bosom of her dress, and seemed to burn her, but with a delicious pain. At almost any other juncture of her commerce with the man it would have frightened her; for the little woman, in spite of her impetuosity, had some obscure element of the national caution in her nature. But now she was in a state when caution must give way to the fiercer and more primitive passions. For nearly three weeks now she had suffered a frenzy of jealous love, and during the absence of her friend, as she called him, was not only tortured with a longing for the sight of him, but also with horrible fears of his infidelity. She had pictured him as returned within the sphere of the influence of Jean Armour—a person she insisted upon regarding as a low-minded, artful hussy with designs upon the Bard. License to almost any degree she would allow the man, whose nature she made allowances for with an amazing liberality; it was the idea of matrimony she dreaded with an anguish of jealous dread. But the poet's letter had brought ample reassurance: he was returned to his Clarinda, more in love with her—more impassioned, than when he went away. He implored for an interview that night, but it must be private. He had matters to discuss of the utmost importance, but they were for her ear alone. He conjured her, by all that was most sacred in love and friendship, to let no third person intrude upon the happiness of their first reunion. Well ... she would not tell Alison that he came, and Alison would go to bed: that was all. But then, the girl slept so light, and had an ear so sensitive ... she must, in that confined space, hear voices...? Nancy knit her soft brows, and behind them, her busy, tortuous little brain made plans.
Alison had been out of doors with Willy that afternoon, and returned somewhat late. It was a blustering spring evening, with a shrewd edge to the wind, and when the girl came into the parlour at the late tea-time there was an unquestionable redness about her eyelids. Alas! it was not the wind that smirched her fair good looks, but tears. For poor Alison, in these days, would cry a little, uncomforted, in her closet, choking back the tears.
'Why, Ally, you have got the cold!' said Nancy. 'I can see it in your eyes.' Alison turned quickly from the light.
'I never get the cold,' she said. But Nancy insisted, and harped upon the ailment—she was convinced that Alison had an influenza coming.
'When you go to bed, which I'd have you do early, love,' she said purringly, 'I'll give you something that will check the horrid thing. A few drops ofaqua vitæin water are infallible at an early stage.' Healthy Alison, who took no medicine stuff, would stoutly have rebelled at any other time, but now she was anxious to divert attention from her red eyes, and promised to take the remedy. When bedtime came, Nancy bade her undress and get into her bed and she would bring her the dose with her own hands.
She was away some little time in her own room, and Alison heard the clink of glass against glass as she prepared the decoction. Water had gone into it, and a few drops of theaqua vitæ, which turned the water into an opaque whiteness. And then Nancy had paused and looked round her with a guilty look. She took another bottle from the shelf beside her bed, and measured a portion of its contents into the half-full wine glass. It was her own sleeping draught—a half dose.
It must not for an instant be supposed that there was anything of the villain in Nancy's composition, or that she intended to do her friend the smallest injury. She well knew that the sleeping draught was of the mildest order—a perfectly harmless drug, as the physician had positively assured her. And she put in only the half dose. Nevertheless, as she carried it into the girl's room, and gave it to her, it was with an averted look. She could not bear to meet Alison's eyes, and her little hand so shook that a part of the liquid was spilt upon the sheet. Then she hurriedly kissed her friend, put out the light, and left her.
Alison lay awake some time, for, upon perfectly healthy nerves, a sleeping draught will occasionally have the reverse of its intended effect. She seemed to get a headache and to become restless. She heard Nancy's movements in her room with peculiar distinctness, and supposed that her friend was preparing for bed. In reality, the deluded little woman was changing her dress from a common to a dainty one—adding, in every ribbon and coaxed trick of curl, to the danger that awaited her—moving furtively, with many a pause, to listen if Alison stirred, or Jean in the attic above. Then a kind of buzzing drowsiness came over Alison—disagreeable, because she seemed to want to fight against it. But it overcame her; and then for some hours she did certainly sleep, and much more heavily than was her wont.
When she awoke, it was with a confused, unpleasant feeling, and the sound of voices in her ears. The room was dark, but a line of light showed under the door. Alison sat up and listened. A curious, nightmare-like sense of danger was upon her, indefinably oppressive. Her ears were acute. She heard Nancy's voice, and a man's voice, unmistakably. Clearness came to her, though her temples throbbed and the drug she had been given buzzed in her head. She slipped to the floor, searched for, but could not find her shoes, groped for her wrapper, and threw it over her shoulders. She crept to the door and lifted the latch noiselessly.
The passage lamp was out, but the parlour was in a glow of brightness. The door had swung open with its old trick, and a stream of light came from it. In brilliant relief the little room and all it held stood out. And, in the circle of light, unconscious of all save each other, they stood—the tempter and the tempted. And behind Alison the big wag-at-the-wall clock, with a guilty twang, struck one.
One of Robert Burns's great labouring hands was clenched, and he leaned heavily on the table with it. Alison could see the veins in it throb and swell with the hot, ungovernable blood. His other arm held Nancy—Nancy, whose little trembling hands covered her face—and who turned, as Alison watched her, to hide it against the man's powerful shoulder. The poet's face was in shadow, for it was bent over the woman. He spoke, but his voice was low and thick; Alison could not catch the words.
She only looked at them a moment, just till the clock struck. Then they moved with a start, and she also moved forward, until she too stood in the circle of light. Petrified, the lovers saw her both at once,—staring, chapfallen, as though they beheld a spirit: only a girl, indeed, with bare feet, and in her nightgown, sleep still in her wide eyes and curls scattered on her shoulders, but hedged about with the immutable dignity of innocence, and strong with the strength of right. She walked straight up to Nancy, and with a little jerk of effort took her into her own arms from the man's embrace, facing him boldly.
'It is too late for visitors here, sir,' she said simply. 'Mrs. Maclehose would have you go.'
The poet's arms dropped to his side and his jaw fell. His sun-browned face had become quite pale, and the words which stammered on his lips would not get themselves spoken. When he moved it was to fumble for his hat. Then he made for the door, without a look or word for those he left; and it might be said that he slunk, then and there, from the room and from the house.
Nancy had slipped from Alison's arms and lay on the floor in a little huddled heap, moaning. Alison tried to raise her, but she would not rise.
'Come, Nancy, come to bed,' whispered the girl. 'You are cold—you are shaking.' She lifted her, and then Nancy stood up, staring round her with miserable, unseeing eyes—deadly pale, and utterly dishevelled.
'I—I slipped,' she said, in a curious dazed way. 'I—slipped—and nearly fell, Ally.'
'Here's my hand,' said Alison. And then, half leading and half carrying her, the girl took the wretched little woman to her bed.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
Alison watched all night long beside her friend. Nancy never let go her hand, but lay holding it, at first in a kind of wretched stupor, staring straight before her, with dry, miserable eyes; then in a sort of palsy of convulsive shivering, and at last in a fit of hysterical weeping, so violent that it seemed to tear her little frame to pieces. Alison soothed and comforted her as best she could, but at first neither peace nor comfort came. The girl's own thoughts were full of bewilderment. Here, in truth, was love—a creature shaken by it through all the innermost places of her being. Alison, too, loved—but then, how differently! Was it the same passion—this, that destroyed her friend, and that which raised her own soul to heights never dreamed of before she had known Herries? Presently Nancy fell into the light doze of sheer exhaustion, and Alison was able to go and dress herself.
But her troubles were by no means over, for Nancy awoke to a plight most piteous—a mental condition almost impossible to cope with. Like one, who, saved from some horrible fate by accident or misadventure, is haunted by phantasmal death in every form, so Nancy, with the tremendous recoil of every natural womanly feeling, beheld herself, again and yet again, on the verge of the great and terrible abyss from which she had been so narrowly and so barely saved. Her mind clung now, with the painful obstinacy and insistence of hysteria, to every symbol and outward sign of safety. Could these stumbling steps of hers be hid? Could she resume, before the men and women of her world, the steady gait of blameless womanhood? With words that harrowed Alison's very soul, she protested her actual innocence, while she bemoaned the folly that had made her risk her reputation. Oh, she had been mad—blind—headstrong! She saw it all now.
'All my life, Ally,' she said, her sweet voice roughened with long crying—'all my life I've been guided by the impulse of the moment. My passion has done what it will with me, and now it has undone me utterly.' Then she fell to harping on the theme of secrecy. Was there anyone who would betray her? How much did Jean know, and did she gossip? And Alison—Alison, who knew all—oh, was she sure of herself? Would she never—never by word, or look, or sign—betray her friend?
'Will you swear to me, Ally, that you'll never tell?' cried Nancy, raising herself in bed. 'I'd be easier if you'd swear upon the Bible never to betray me!'
'Nay,' said Alison, proudly, 'I'll not swear. Have I ever lied to you that you should ask an oath? But I'll promise you, Nancy, by all you've been to me, and done for me, that no word of mine shall ever tell your secret to any human being.' Nancy sank back among her pillows with a sigh of relief.
'Then I'm safe,' she said, 'forhewill never betray me; to kiss and tell is not his nature. He is all the noblest generosity! Don't think my love is dead, Ally,' she added in something of her old tones. 'It lives, and it will live, purified. I'll tear the earthly part of it from my heart, and live in hopes that we may meet in heaven!' Soothed by this interesting and sanguine reflection, Nancy grew calmer. She took a little of her sleeping medicine, and Alison was just beginning to look forward to an hour of peace, when she awoke with a scream. 'Oh, God!' she cried aloud, 'my key!'
'Hush, Nancy; Jean will hear you,' said Alison, patiently. 'What key?'
'My key,' reiterated Nancy, working herself up into a passion of terror; 'my house key. Oh! fool that I was! I gave it to him in all innocence: it was before your own eyes, Alison, and only to save Jean when she was throng. It has an ivory label to it, with my name and the street's name, and if it is found with him I am undone—undone!' She twined her fingers in her hair and would have torn it but that Alison held her hands. Alison herself looked blank enough; the matter of the key struck her as a bad business, incriminating evidence enough in the hands of such a man as Burns—careless, if he was not malicious, and, like all men, leaving things about. 'Ally, as you love me, you must go and get it from him!' said Nancy; 'I'll not trust the matter upon paper. I must have a messenger, and that messenger must be you.'
'Nay, but that's too much!' cried Alison, turning white.
'Too much?' said Nancy, piteously. 'Too much to save your friend whom you have promised to save? Oh, Ally, pity me—pity me—and go!' She put up her trembling arms and caught Alison about the neck, clinging to her.
'If I go,' said poor Alison, desperately, 'will you promise me one thing, Nancy—never, never to send me on another message to this man?'
'Never! I swear!' cried Nancy. 'Oh, Ally, I've been wrong to do it so often, most hideously selfish and wrong so to have used your good-nature. But you'll forgive me, for I knew not what I did!'
Alison met the inevitable with a kind of cold, white calm. Her very flesh shrank from the thought of meeting Burns, of being near him and breathing the same air. Now she must not only go to his house, but in all probability enter it, doing that which, to anyone not acquainted with the intricacies of the affair and her own obscure part in it, was, on the face of it, open to the gravest misconstruction. Should Herries know of it—what then? But a kind of despair had come to Alison on this point. She must do what she had to do; it was all a ghastly mistake, a growing and intolerable injustice, but she must blunder on with it now. She was the same Alison, and in the same mood, who had desperately promised in Jacky's twilight nursery, weeks ago, to marry Mr. Cheape because duty drove her to it, and she saw no other way.
It was agreed that she should wait till nearly dusk before setting out, and it was, perhaps, five or six o'clock before she left the house. She hurried through the familiar streets, choosing the obscurer ones, and keeping in the shadow—haunted by a sense of the guilt which was not hers. She stood at last before the odiously familiar door in St. James's Square, and knocked. It was opened to her by Nicol, and Alison's flesh crept, for she loathed the man, and feared him now—she knew not why.
'Is Mr. Burns within?' she asked in a low voice. Nicol looked her up and down with an indescribable insolence.
'No, mistress,' he said, 'he's not.'
'Will he be in soon?' Alison forced herself to ask.
'Are you that anxious to see him?' said Nicol, with a leer. Alison drew herself up, with a passionate scorn, though she trembled in every limb.
'I have important business with Mr. Burns,' she faltered, 'and desire an interview.'
'Ay, oh, ay, I understand!' said Nicol. 'Well, mistress, come in and wait. Rob's door is never closed to bonny lasses.' He held the door wide. Behind his uncouth figure opened a vista of dingy passage, ending in a stair. Alison hesitated, half drew back; to cross that threshold was horrible to her; it seemed to put her in the power of men—of bad men. She held her hand to her heart—it fluttered so—and cast a longing look down the empty street. Oh, for some help! But no help came.
'If there is some room where I could wait—alone' ... she began, with an unlucky inflection on the last word, which Nicol's ear caught, and bitterly resented.
'Oh, ay, there's a room where you can be private,' answered Nicol, with suspicious blandness. 'Come up the stair.' He led the way, and Alison followed in the close, malodorous darkness.
Burns occupied two rooms on the first floor of the house, a parlour and sleeping-closet communicating. It was into the former of these that Nicol ushered Alison—a disorderly and ill-kept room, with a bottle and glasses on the table, and articles of a man's wearing apparel strewn about upon the chairs and floor.
''Tis no room for a fine miss like you,' said Nicol, with dangerous politeness. 'I'll take it upon myself to usher you into our sanctum sanctorum—'tis more genteel.'
'But if this is the parlour,' said Alison, looking round her nervously, and perhaps beginning a little to lose her head, 'if this is the parlour, had I not better remain here?'
'No, no,' said Nicol, speciously, 'we have the other—much more private. Here anyone may come at any moment, you see, and if your business is private—' It was a touch of devilish cunning, for terror seized Alison at the thought of an intrusion.
'If, then, you think it wiser—' she said, looking about her with startled eyes.
'Ay, come away—much wiser'—said Nicol. 'See here!' He held open the door of the inner room—its only entrance—and Alison walked in. The moment her feet were over the threshold, Nicol slammed-to the door upon her, and locked it with a loud report.
'There, my bonny bird!' he called, his grinning mouth to the panel; 'we've got you safe and sound! Are ye "alone" enough in there for your taste? 'Od, it's there you'll bide till Rob comes hame and lets ye out!' He exploded in a fit of laughter; here was a piece of horse-play after his own heart.
Stunned and stupid, Alison had tottered a few steps into the inner room. A bed in the corner, unmade since the morning, showed that it was the poet's sleeping chamber. And she was trapped beyond all possibility of escape.