CHAPTER XXXIX.The letter which Nicol had conveyed from Burns to Herries lay unopened at the office of the latter for a matter of about, perhaps, thirty-six hours. Delivered very late in the evening, it was not conveyed to Herries that night, because he had already retired. In the early morning hours he was summoned to the death-bed of his partner, and he only returned from that melancholy scene in order, after a hurried meal, to set off to a remote village in the Pentlands, where, under an engagement with the dead man, he must make arrangements for the funeral. Returning at night, dog-tired, after many hours spent in the saddle (for it had been necessary to go on horseback), he had not then attempted to examine his correspondence. But the first letter that he opened in the morning was that from St. James's Square.He sat still after its perusal—stunned. The morning sun streamed in through the three long windows of his fine room, and found him, perhaps on hour later, still sitting motionless, the letter in his hand. The anguish of surprise was not his, for, after all, the letter contained mere confirmation of long-latent suspicion. But it came as a fearful blow nevertheless. Here was a man who had expected little of men and women, but he had got less than he expected after all. He had believed that he had cherished no illusions, and dreamed no dreams; but the modest hopes that he had allowed himself to entertain of faith in one human being, whom he loved, were dashed. The cynic's disgust, as well as the man's heart-wrung sorrow, was his portion.Yet Herries was a lawyer, keen of vision, and trained in the detection of deceit, and to him that letter actually did smack false at the first reading, and afterwards also. He had heard much, as was inevitable, of the sturdy independence of the peasant poet; certainly this letter was not the letter of such a man. It was a suspiciously subservient, an actually cringing letter, and in every line rang false. Yet Herries knew, and recognised at once, the poet's handwriting; for Burns's letters at that day were often handed round the town as curiosities, and the young lawyer had seen at least a score. A certain wearied languor had come over Herries, numbing his faculties, so that in this matter they had almost ceased to serve him. He told himself that his love was dead—nipped by this long frost of cold suspicion, and ruined forever by this base association with men and ways unclean and devious. Yet he was a just man, and he would not condemn Alison unheard. He had already given her the chance of explanation and defence; he would give it her again. He would seek her out, and he would confront her with the letter—ask her if it were true or false. He would make her speak; and those grave lips that he had kissed so often: those candid eyes—that indescribably childlike wide innocence of brow that had been Alison's charm, rather than and (to him) beyond all beauty—well, he should learn once for all if they lied, and were only the fair outer covering of deceit and blackness. It was impossible that he could be absent again during office hours, for the previous day had been a blank one, and the pressure of the accumulated work of the past weeks was becoming daily more unendurable. But in the evening he would go to the Potterrow, and put an end to the mysteries that destroyed his peace.He set out, accordingly, after he had dined. It was a damp, windy night, with heavy rain-clouds hurrying from the west. Hardly an hour before him Alison had trod those pavements, her face set to the New Town, trying to hide herself as she went. Herries walked with his head held high, conning over the stringent things that he should say in the coming interview, yet striving also that he should be just and calm. Jean opened to him with a glum face. Well did the honest servant know that things were going wrong. Her sympathies were all with Alison.'I have business with Miss Graham,' said Herries. 'Can I see her?''I doot no, sir,' said Jean. 'The young leddy is from home, and the mistress ill in her bed.''I will come in and wait,' said Herries; 'but do not you disturb your mistress—it is not necessary.' He felt a repugnance to seeing his cousin; more lies, he told himself, and impotent anger on his own part, would be the only result.He walked into the parlour. The little room had an ominously neglected and inhospitable air; the fire was nearly out, and the hard, lingering light of the spring evening showed up all the shabbinesses of the little nest, so kindly hid in the cosy winter hours. Herries threw himself into a chair, prepared to wait. Half-an-hour dragged by and no one came. The demon of restlessness got him, and he began to pace the room. He thought he would see Nancy after all, and called Jean.'Ask my cousin if she can see me,' he said, and at the same moment Nancy's voice called to him faintly from her room. He entered it.The invalid lay against a pile of pillows, in her pink wrapper, looking, indeed, merely the ghost of herself. Her cheeks were pallid, her dark eyes ringed, the lines upon her face were visibly deepened.'Why, Nancy, I find you an invalid!' said Herries, in astonishment. 'I fear I intrude; but my business is with Miss Graham to-night, and if you can tell me where she is gone, or when she is likely to return, I will not disturb you a moment longer.'Nancy trembled, for all the terrors of discovery beset her. The courage to answer her cousin coherently was not in her; her quivering lips would hardly form her words.'Ally is—is gone out,' she murmured. 'She did not tell me where. A walk with Willy is her custom at this hour, and—''It is past seven o'clock,' said Herries, impatiently, 'and Willy is in the kitchen with his books.' He frowned, and his eyes, full of freshly-roused suspicion, searched Nancy's face. But a man cannot bully a sick woman in her bed.'I shall wait for Miss Graham,' he said shortly, as he turned on his heel, 'if need be, till midnight.' He returned to the parlour, where Jean had lit a candle, and continued his watch. Nancy, on her bed, tossed to and fro, a prey to perfect agony of mind. It was more than two hours since Alison had left the house. What had become of her? Here was Herries on the trail of some discovery. The wretched little woman saw herself upon the brink of ruin. She rolled over on her face, biting the sheet between her chattering teeth, stiff and cold, and in a kind of rigour.In a rage of obstinacy, Herries waited on. The wag-at-the-wall clock struck eight—the half-hour—then nine. He started up, and went to the servant in her kitchen.'Jean,' he said, and his voice had a curiously unnatural sound, 'I cannot get from your mistress where Miss Graham is gone. Can you tell me?' The woman hesitated, and then spoke out, bursting, indeed, with a sense of Alison's wrongs, though about, alas! only to add to them.'Gone?' she said. 'Weel ken I whar she's gone! Just where she's been too often, sir, though I say it that am but a sairvant—''Take care what you do say,' said Herries, sternly. 'I have ears for no idle gossip. Where did she go?''To Burns's lodging, sir,' said Jean, setting fire to a long trail, 'and, sir—''That's enough,' said Herries. His voice was quiet, but his action was like lightning, and, before the slow-moving Scotchwoman could put out a hand to stop him, or utter another word, he was out upon the stair and in the street, making for St. James's Square as though the devil were after him.His haste undid him. Had he waited but a moment more, the flood-gates of Jean's confidence would have been opened wide, and from the honest creature's lips he would have learnt, if not the whole truth, yet enough to light him to the rest. But that was not to be.CHAPTER XL.There is no ground for supposing that during his Edinburgh sojourn, Robert Burns succumbed to those habits of intemperance which afterwards destroyed him. It was an age of drink, and he no doubt drank, as did nearly all his contemporaries, immoderately at times. But there is much to show that in these days he was sober in his habits, for the most part, and no record whatever that he disgraced himself by conspicuous over-indulgence. The end of his visit, however, was inevitably a time of trial in this respect. There were farewell visits to be paid to many a roystering character and tavern companion; and the nature of such farewells can easily be imagined, along with their result. On the day succeeding his last visit to the Potterrow, Burns drank heavily, impelled thereto by impulses less agreeable than those of mere good-fellowship. When he turned into his lodging, which he did only a few minutes before Herries reached the door, he was very drunk indeed.He stumbled upstairs to the parlour. Nicol was there, and made him some excited communication, pointing to the inner door. But the festive condition of the Bard made him hopelessly dense to oral instruction. He had not a notion what his excited friend was talking about.'Man, pull yourself together,' cried Nicol, eagerly, hearing a knock from below, and running to the window. 'As I'm alive, here's our cock o' the walk seeking his bonny hen.''Who?' said the poet, confusedly.'Herries, man, Herries!' shouted Nicol, slapping his thigh. 'The little lawyer body ye were to lick. Wheesht! here he comes.''My enemy!' said the Bard, grandiloquently, with a dim feeling that a great occasion was upon him. He half-sat, half-propped himself upon the corner of the table, with arms folded across his chest. He was ruddy with wine; his jet black hair was spread upon his brow; in the fine blue and buff of his best suit, with his magnificent shoulders, his grand head and lowering eye—it was impossible to deny, drunken though he was, the splendour of his presence. To him, thus, and to Nicol, was ushered Herries, white with anger, and a terrible vital excitement.Herries walked straight to the figure on the table.'Where—where is she?' he said, but he was hardly audible, for his throat was parched. The poet lurched a little, but steadied himself with an inimitable air of tipsy gravity.'Speak up, ma billy!' he said. 'I'm dull the day.''I ask you—and you know it—where is Miss Graham?' said Herries, with clenching hands.The poet cocked an eyebrow.'Nae man speirs at me for glaikit lasses,' he observed virtuously; 'you are come to the wrong shop.'Nicol burst into a coarse guffaw.'Nay, sir,' he said, 'you are come right enough, though Rob, here, is too modest to admit it. We hae your bonny bird safe and sound.... Here, mistress, come out now! there's ain to fetch you—' He flung open the bedroom door, close to which he had stood, with his hand upon the lock, since Herries's entry. And out of the dark room into the light one walked Alison Graham.Her face, her neck, her very hands, were white: they were drenched with whiteness, so that she seemed more dead than alive; and the lines of her face were drawn so deep, that it had suddenly lost the roundness and the air of youth. Her wild eyes went from face to face with a hunted look; the light hurt them, and she raised her hand, but it fell powerless, while her look riveted itself at last on her lover.'Alison!' said Herries. 'How ... how ...' But he could not speak. Yet justice should be hers—that thought printed itself in fiery letters on his reeling brain. Here—no matter that it was before these men, before them or before the world—he would ask her why she stood there, and let her clear herself if she could.'Alison,' he said, going close up to her, 'whose shame is this—yours or another's?'Alison's eyes looked round the room in a vain search for help. They fell on Nicol, who, crassly ignorant of the real circumstances of her case, could hardly have helped her, and certainly would not if he could. They fell on Burns, but Burns was drunk, and had he been sober, must sooner have protected the woman he had nearly ruined than helpless Alison. Alison's eyes fell to the ground, and all the long struggle of the past weeks concentrated itself in the anguish of one moment's swift decision. Her happiness, or Nancy's honour—which?Her chin sank upon her breast: she seemed to shrink—the image of shame.'I ... I have deceived you, sir,' she stammered, with lips that scarcely moved.It was the truth, but so little of it, and so hopelessly perverted! Alison raised her eyes to her lover's face, and he should have read the real truth in them, but he was blind.'That's enough,' was all he said. 'I have asked and you have answered. On your own head be it!'For a few seconds no one moved in the dead silence. The poet, half asleep, with his chin upon his chest, lurched and swayed, now one way, and now another. Herries's eyes flamed, as they looked at him, with the cold flame of disgust and hate.'Your host is drunk,' he said to Alison, almost cavalierly. He had become icily cool, and the crisp tones of his business manner came to him, as though he stood in his own orderly office with a client in front of him. 'I cannot leave you here, you understand,' he continued, addressing her; 'you are in my relative's care, and I am her representative. You must leave this house—for the present, at least—and leave it with me.' He went to the door, and opened it, with a gesture that seemed to command rather than to solicit her exit. No one interfered, not even Nicol moved or spoke. With bowed head, Alison walked slowly from the room. And as she did so, the swaying figure of Burns, supine, fell prostrate on the table in a drunken sleep.Out of doors it was raining, pouring with rain out of the black night sky. Neither Alison nor her companion could shelter themselves, and the gusty wind blew in their bent faces as they struggled along. A link-boy's torch flashed at the corner of the square, and at the end of Princes Street there was a pack of chairmen sheltering under a wall, for it was an Assembly night.'I will see you under shelter and in safety,' said Herries, speaking for the first time. 'But after that I can never willingly see your face again. Do you understand?' He had to raise his voice against the wind and the hiss and patter of the rain.'I understand,' said Alison; 'I expected nothing else,' she added proudly. Yet the pride was for him, not herself.Hetake that which was smirched and spoiled? Not a fair one, but the fairest of all, must be his, and how could she ever be fairest again—even though Herries should know all—stained to the soul as she felt, after those destroying, those damning hours in the squalid chamber of a libertine? It would be a relief, she thought, to part. Oh, let him go! let him go!He called a chair and handed her into it, punctiliously instructing and paying the chairman. How it stabbed Alison that he should do this now. How often, in the happy dealings of a man with a girlish guest, he had paid such little sums on her behalf. But all that was over and done with. And in the pelting rain, and in the dark, wordless they parted.Alison felt in her pocket for Nancy's key. At least she had that and her friend should be safe. She had seen it among a lot of untidy litter on a table in her prison, and had had the sense and courage to take it. That must be her reward.* * * * *At midnight, a white figure stood at Nancy's bedside. It was Alison, with a light in her hand. After a brief and curiously dry account of her adventure on her return home, she had gone to her room, but it was not to sleep.'Nancy,' she now said, 'I'm going home!' Nancy sat up in her bed.'Home, child?' she cried. 'What do you mean? Oh—no—no! You'd never leave me in my misery! You are frightened and upset. 'Twas an odious adventure—some trick of that beast Nicol. But to-morrow you'll be yourself again, Ally—my strength and comfort—my only one!''I got you the key,' said Alison, doggedly. 'I—I have done what I could. But now I'm going home, and you must not prevent me.'Nancy burst into tears.'Oh—Ally!' she sobbed, 'there's something between us!''Yes,' said Alison, dully, 'there's something between me and all the world from to-day. But I'll go home and hide myself—and forget. You'll not rise, Nancy,' she went on, 'for I've been to Jean and she will help me away. The coach goes at five—to-morrow is the day for it, you know, and I could not wait another week. I'll come in and say good-bye before I go.' Nancy turned her face to the wall, and sobbed and wept. But Alison's eyes were dry.A few hours later she stood in Nancy's room again, in the grey dawn, hooded and cloaked for her journey. But her little friend had drugged herself into a deep sleep, and Alison did not wake her. In one of her tiny hands—the hand that had loaded Alison with easy kindness and covered her with a blame and shame not hers—was clasped the unlucky key. She breathed deeply and peacefully with parted lips—those lips made for laughter and for love—the swollen eyelids fringed and closed, the dark hair scattered on the pillow. Alison stood and looked at her long, without resentment, without love, without feeling of any kind, for feeling was numb with her now. Then she turned away, and went and kissed Willy in his sleep. And there were no other farewells.'I doubt you are leaving us in trouble, Miss Ally!' said kindly Jean. She stood at the coach door—the March wind scattering the scanty locks upon her rough, broad forehead—loth to part from the young lady she had liked and served through all these winter weeks.'Yes, Jean,' said Alison, sadly,' good-bye.''But, oo—it'll a' win richt i' the end?' said the cheerful woman, tentatively.'No—never!' answered Alison, with the tremendous finality of youth.The horn sounded, the whip cracked, and the lumbering vehicle lurched on its way. And so Alison went back to The Mains.CHAPTER XLI.It might have been about eight o'clock the next morning when Lizzie, the old housekeeper in George Street, thrust her head in at her master's door.'Maircy me!' she exclaimed, and there was some cause for her wonder in the sight, at that hour, of candles burning in the broad day, and Herries at his desk, where, indeed, he had been all night.Sleep had left him and thought had become intolerable. With an effort almost superhuman he had determined to lose himself in the technicalities of his work, and he had done it. But he now looked, with bloodshot eyes, his tumbled linen and disordered hair, the living image of dissipation rather than business. Lizzie eyed him most suspiciously. He never drank, but the censorious old woman believed he had been drinking.'The Lord be gude to us!' she ejaculated, 'what's wrang? Wastin' waxen candles this gait!' And she blew them out, and snuffed them with her fingers. 'You're wanted,' she went on. 'There's a lad frae Creighton's wi' a message express. Ye maun gang there at aince anent the dog.''What about the dog?' said Herries.'Weel,' said Lizzie, 'as far as I can get it frae the lad, the tyke is turned upon them all, and aye he sits girning by the corp, and they canna get it coffined. They're for you to gang and fleech him awa', or somethin' that gait.''I will come,' said Herries.Creighton's unfortunate canine companion had given some trouble already, which Herries had not grudged. Within the hour of his master's death, when it was necessary that the last offices should be done, Herries had coaxed the poor starving brute from his post upon the bed, tempting him with a piece of meat. But no sooner was the morsel swallowed than the creature ran back to the room of death, and scratching at the door, pushed in and leapt upon the bed. Nothing had since dislodged him, and Herries had ordered him to be left in peace—a solitary mourner. It had been a mistaken kindness, for thirst had probably now turned the beast rabid. Herries took a pistol out of its case, and primed and loaded it. For Dick there could only be the kindly ultimatum of a bullet.He went straight to Mr. Creighton's lodgings. It was the same March morning, windy, but now fair, which was seeing Alison on her sad way home. The wind cut him like a knife, though it was not really cold. He had eaten nothing for many hours, and a wretchedness of spirit was upon him, beyond anything that he had deemed it possible he could know.In Creighton's room the coffin stood upon its trestles, and stiff and still, beneath the sheet upon the bed, lay its belated occupant. At the starkly upturned feet crouched the terrier, his red eyes glowing like cinders, at every slightest sound or movement drawing his lips back from his teeth in a rabid snarl. Herries approached him, with a half hope the dog would know him and be pacified, but the brute would have sprung at him in a moment. He drew back sufficiently far to take a deliberate and steady aim.The shot rang out with terrific reverberation within the narrow, echoing limits of the empty room, which filled instantly with a blue and pungent smoke. When that cleared off, Herries perceived the dog had hardly moved, arrested in his crouching attitude by swift death. Presently a single scarlet trickle from behind his ear stained the whiteness of his master's shroud, his fierce eye dimmed and glazed, and his bristling body stiffened as it lay.Herries, the smoking pistol in his hand, stood still a moment—in his disordered dress, and with his pale, set face and bloodshot eyes, a singularly haunting image of the suicide. But just as some men, too strong to swoon, must bear a physical agony to its last limit, so to Herries, with the accurately-balanced character of his intellect and his temper, the impulse of self-destruction could never come. He must bear, he would overcome: the iron will survived; the brain, active and restless, keen and clear, worked on—a finely-regulated mechanism. But his heart was empty, and from that moment he closed its portals on the world.* * * * *CHAPTER XLII.Time, who is the great healer, does his work with admirable celerity for some. By the spring of that year, though there came to her in the early weeks of April the astounding news of Burns's marriage to Jean Armour, Mrs. Maclehose had resumed the peaceful tenor of her blameless existence as a cruelly deserted wife and anxious mother. This little vessel, so lightly rigged, so fairy-like, with sails and pennants spread for none but summer breezes, had encountered rough weather, but had survived with wonderfully little hurt. Helmsman and pilot, perchance, had suffered, and an honest seaman or so gone by the board; but the spirit of the little ship, undaunted, rode lightly on the calm. The little Edinburgh world of Mrs. Maclehose's acquaintances observed with edification her devotion to her delicate youngest boy. She, indeed, moved herself and her small household to Prestonpans for a season, where he lay. In the August of that year little Danny died, and it may be said most truthfully that no child ever winged his way from earth to heaven from tenderer maternal arms.For all the rest of Nancy's doings are they not written in more books than one, so that he who runs may read? It is to be conjectured that her relations with her cousin became tacitly somewhat strained after the events recorded in this history, although there was no open quarrel. It seems probable that Herries, after Danny's death, and in the hardness of heart which grew upon him at this time, withdrew the superfluities, at anyrate, of the monetary assistance he had been in the habit of conveying to his relative.This may have been one of the contributing causes to the curious impulse which, about the autumn of the year '91, moved Nancy to think of rejoining her long-lost husband, and induced her to undertake a voyage to the West Indies with that laudable end in view. The journey was not a success. She, indeed, found Mr. Maclehose with little difficulty, but she found along with him the partner of his exile, a swarthy lady of those climes, with a numerous coffee-colored progeny. And this discovery so shocked the moral sensibilities of the little lady, who had regarded with a lenient eye the amorous delinquencies of her Sylvander, that she incontinently fled the marital premises, and returned to Leith in the same vessel that had brought her out. The most remarkable feature of this episode is the fact that Robert Burns, although at this time nearly three years married, did indubitably come to Edinburgh to seek a farewell interview with his Clarinda. How they two met, with what feelings, with what memories, who shall be bold enough to say? The world, at least, became infinitely the richer for this parting and for poor Clarinda's absence. For the poet's soul was stirred, and soon fine Edinburgh ladies at the harp and spinet, and country lasses at their milking, were singing, to its melting air,—'Now in her green mantle blythe Nature arrays,And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes,While birds warble welcome in ilka green show,But to me it's delightless—my Nannie's awa'.The snaw-drap and primrose our woodlands adorn,And violets bathe in the weet o' the morn;They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blow,They mind me o' Nannie—and Nannie's awa'.Thou lav'rock that springs frae the dews o' the lawn,The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn;And thou mellow mavis that hails the night-fa'Give over for pity—my Nannie's awa'.'And also of this curious farewell were born those lines in which is reached, perhaps, the very topmost summit of the lyrical genius of Burns—those lines which are the epitome of all love-tragedy—of all hopeless passion—of all parting woe. And these shall the painstaking reader, who toils to the end of this history, read on the last page for his reward.Sylvander and Clarinda continued to correspond with considerable desultoriness during the few years of life that remained to the Rhymer, and sad to state, in these communications there is to be traced a very decided recriminative tartness, which is a blow to the ingenuous and sentimental reader. So sputtered out, in rather fiery sparks—as, indeed, is the too common wont of such—one of the most curious of the world's classic flirtations.Mrs. Maclehose lived to a great age, becoming a mostespiègleand charming old lady—the centre of a large and admiring acquaintance. Years after the poet's death, when all danger was over, and passion, too, dead, it was her chief boast, her 'meed of fame,' to figure as Burns's 'Clarinda.' She kept, and would exhibit, many little souvenirs of the Bard, and on all matters pertaining to the history of his Edinburgh visits, she was for many years the greatest living authority. She publicly and impartially would maintain till the last that the poet's marriage with a peasant was the greatest mistake of his life, dragging him down to a low level, intellectually as well as socially; whereas with higher companionship he might have risen to heights incalculably nobler, both of prosperity and of fame. To her dying day she expressed a pious wish that she might meet in heaven the Bard whose soul she felt that she alone had understood as it deserved in the imperfect communionship of earth. All things considered, the hope of meeting in quite another quarter might have seemed more justifiable. But so—exit our charming Nancy from these veracious pages.To Herries, meanwhile, in his house in George Street, these years brought solitary success and lonely gain. He set himself to his work with an iron determination to forget the past, and it seemed that he succeeded. To him Alison Graham was dead, as truly dead as though she lay in yonder graveyard under the shadow of the Castle rock, with a great stone to weight her down until the Judgment Day. He never thought of her at all. He never pictured his room now as a drawing-room, with gracious feminine appurtenances; it was the office, pure and simple. In Creighton's room below worked his new partner, a young and stirring man. The business extended itself in all directions and flourished like a miracle. Some of the most resounding names in Scotland figured on the green tin boxes, in their yearly increasing phalanx, in Herries's room. He had the name of a hard man, and was, no doubt, rather feared than loved. But so he willed it—for he had had enough of love. Round him, in these busy years, grew wider and yet wider the gallant New Town of Edinburgh—curving into crescents, and widening into squares and handsome residential streets. More and more, the genteel world gravitated to this quarter, and left the Old Town to the squalor of decay. Herries, for one, never visited the old streets and closes—giving in, no doubt, to the new fashion. The High Street was his limit; the devious and narrow ways which led to the Potterrow knew him no more.And meanwhile, down in the rich south country, in the little white farmhouse among the broom, on the bonny banks of Nith, Robert Burns pursued the downward tenor of his way. Poet and exciseman, farmer and bard: the kindly husband and father, the incorrigible rake: the eager host, the far too frequent—and far, far too uproariously welcomed—guest: the copious correspondent, the ill-balanced politician: the reckless, eager, revolutionary spirit, the remorse-stricken, disappointed, penitent man; at once affectionate and quarrelsome—losing friend after friend, and tiring out the patience of men and women who would fain have befriended him to the last; quixotically generous in money matters, refusing money for his songs, and then forced to accept, in grinding bitterness of spirit, the eleemosynary five-pound note under pressure of inexorable necessity—so he stands out, a tragic figure for all time, the presiding genius, the Rhymer of the North. Too soon the fair page—or that which had promised so fair—of the life at Elliesland had to be turned down, the stock and plenishing of the little farm scattered and sold, and the patient Jean and her little flock of helpless bairns made to flit sadly to Dumfries. Here the temptations of the country town and its taverns soon finished what the too trying and demoralising routine of the Excise had begun; and in the squalor of excess—in sadness, illness, disillusionment and pain—the shining light of genius grew dim, and flickered to extinction.CHAPTER XLIII.As time went on, and his fortune accumulated, there came to Archibald Herries that impulse which generally visits the laborious and land-loving Scot at some period of his career—the impulse to possess himself of territorial acres—the ancestral ones if possible. The family from which Herries sprang had owned land in the Galloway region, or near about Kirkcudbright. It occurred to him suddenly, in the summer of '96, when town was empty, and the grass growing up between the cobbles of the Edinburgh streets, after its rural wont, that he would take a tour in the South and re-visit the country of his sires. He set out with a couple of good nags—one ridden by his servant, with a pack-saddle.It was a successful expedition (all worldly matters prospered with Herries in these days), and in more ways than in mere pleasure. Not only did he see the country to advantage in the fine summer weather, but he discovered that a small property, with its excellent mansion house, which had once been the ancient possession of a younger branch of his family, was for sale. There seemed no reason—certainly not want of funds—why he should not become the purchaser. It might have occurred to him to ask himself why he, unmarried and childless, should burden himself with acres never to become an inheritance. But no such consideration gave him pause. He was inwardly determined that, at the first moment he thought fit to do so, he should marry—ay, and beget sons to carry on his name and fame. True, that moment had never come; but it was not for love's sake that it tarried—or so he was convinced.It was on his return journey that he stayed for a few nights at Dumfries. With his pleasure-trip he had combined a certain modicum of business, and the affairs of an important client detained him in the country-town longer than he meant. In the long, summer evenings he would stroll about the streets, losing himself in its little vennels and closes, and stopping every now and then to stare about him, as a man will in a place that is strange to him. That Dumfries was becoming famous as the last home of the man who had practically ruined his life, Herries may have known, but only vaguely. The fashionable world had dropped the poet Burns. The town roared over 'Tam o' Shanter' when it appeared, but forgot to pension the unlucky bard struggling with his poverty on the banks of Nith.It was one morning, as he sat at breakfast in his tavern, that a messenger brought Herries a note. It was written in a sprawling, uncertain hand, and was unsigned, undated and unaddressed. It ran—'A dying fellow-creature uses the privilege of his sad condition to summon Mr. Herries to his house. It may be that Mr. Herries will there hear that which might be of importance to his affairs.' Herries turned the note over with an incredulous smile. Who in Dumfries could know of anything that was of importance to him? A little boy waited to guide him to the house of his correspondent. Herries thought that he would go. The mystery would help to pass an idle morning.The child led him a little way down the hill, and guided him to a small and humble street called, as Herries observed, the Wee Vennel. They stopped before a decent two-storeyed house, like an artisan's dwelling of the better class.'Here, my boy,' said Herries, giving the child a shilling, 'can't you tell me who it is that desires to see me?''No. I was not to say, sir,' answered the boy. He was a fine little fellow of about nine or ten, and as he spoke he raised his large black eyes—surely Herries had seen eyes just like these before—to the stranger's face.The door was opened by a quiet-looking, young woman with a sweet face, but Herries did not then observe her with any particularity. She asked him gently to walk upstairs. At the door of a room opening to the left, she paused.'You will be very quiet, will you not, sir?' she asked. 'You'll not excite him? He has not long to live.' She had a quiet, controlled, and yet a very sad voice. Herries then noticed her wedding-ring, and also the fact that she seemed very near her time. She opened the door to the sick-room, and left him.The room was cross-lighted by two windows set in opposite walls, and by one of these, which was opened to the street and to the summer air and sunshine, was drawn a great chair, where someone sat, propped by a pile of pillows. A very pretty young girl in the rustic style sat near with an open book upon her knee, from which she had been reading aloud. She rose as Herries entered, and quietly left the room. It was Jessie Lewars, a neighbour's pretty daughter, who helped to minister to the dying poet—an innocent type of much that had been the reverse of innocent in his life—a characteristic attendant enough. Not as yet had the faintest warning reached Herries in whose presence it was that, after eight years of silent hatred, he stood. Something of awe, indeed, held him, for he recognised by instinct the atmosphere of death. But he walked up to the chair in total unsuspicion, mechanically holding out a hand. And then a voice arrested him.'Nay, not yet, sir!' said Burns. 'Wait! When once before you met me, you held your hand behind you. It may be you'll put it back again before we've done.'Herries started violently, and his hand dropped to his side, for now he saw and knew his enemy.But this—this deathlike image—could it indeed be Robert Burns? The last time that Herries had seen him—that only too memorable time—he had been in the hey-day of his splendid manhood, flushed with wine and bold with license, handsome as Bacchus, careless of mankind—balancing on the corner of a table in unblushing drunkenness. Now, a spectre faced the amazed intruder—hollow-eyed and fever-haunted, the bony frame of a skeleton, the traces of death's clayey finger on cheek and temple, lip and brow. Only the eyes glowed with their wonted and sombre fire; they seemed to look Herries through and through—to read the secrets of his heart. In spite of the old hatred, and battling with the old contempt, there struggled into Herries's sensations an unwilling reverence. All through what seemed to him the fantastic interview which ensued he strove with bitterness to assert himself. But it was with the curious and baffling consciousness that a greater than himself, albeit stained with a thousand sins and follies, strove with him and held him down.CHAPTER XLIV.'Will you not be seated, sir?' said Burns, pointing to the chair which Jessie Lewars had vacated. Herries, with a gesture and an inclination, intimated his wish to stand; and throughout the interview he continued to do so at some little distance from the sick man, his head bent, his eyes upon the ground, save when they were raised to meet the poet's dark and penetrating gaze.'Now, sir,' the Bard began, raising himself with difficulty in his chair, 'have patience while you listen to me. You owe me the hearing which the dying may exact from those they leave behind.''I will listen to you,' said Herries, shortly.'Last night,' continued Burns; 'these two or three nights, indeed, I have seen you pass my door, unwitting; for here I sit with a sick man's look-out upon the world he must soon leave. I remembered you, and a bit of the Devil's work I did when the wine was red and ginger hot in the mouth came back to me, for it concerned your house. I have gossips in the town—too many, perhaps—and I soon heard that the great Edinburgh lawyer, Mr. Herries, was abiding at the "Globe," alone, but for his servant. Now, why alone?' The questioner's dark eye rested upon Herries's with a look half quizzical, half sombre.'Where is man's God-given companion—where is the wife, sir?''I have no wife,' said Herries, sternly, most bitterly resenting the allusion to his private matters—yet, somehow, held by the overpowering personality of his interlocutor.'What?' cried Burns. 'Then where is the lass that you loved—for you did love her—the big, bonny body wi' the bunch o' curls? Well I mind her, though she liked me little!''If you speak of Miss Graham,' said Herries, his lips hardly able to form the name, 'I have never seen her or heard of her since the night I took her from your house.''Man alive!' ejaculated the poet, staring at his guest in blank astonishment. 'Is it possible? That there was a mischief brewing through some trickery of that sour devil, Nicol, I knew—fu' though I was, and roarin' fu' that night. But, as I live, I never thought but that you and the lass would kiss and make it up or ever you got the length of Princes Street!''Was I to take a sweetheart from your chamber?' said Herries, with a sneer.'But, surely,' cried Burns, 'surely you knew the lass was there against her will? She had come on some cantrip of my Clarinda—well, I must e'en be plain, your cousin, Mrs. Maclehose; we had some trifle of dalliance in those days, and your girl was Cupid's messenger—just once too often, it would seem.''But she as good as told me with her own lips,' said Herries, 'that the disgrace of her situation was her own, and that she had deceived me....''Then she lied!' said Burns, energetically, 'and lied to save her friend, who was indeed most particularly in terror that your honour's self should scent her little game.... Listen, sir. I was never one to tell when I had kissed, but I must e'en out with it now. Here's a grave matter that needs more clearing even than I thought—and your own relative's honour is surely as safe with you as with me. The little lady thrives, I hear, on the fairest pinnacle of good fame, and you would be the last to interrupt her prosperity. But in those merry days she had a kindly eye for a poor Bard—and troth, so had the Bard for her—and we had—well, sundry tender passages and letters, though all within the strictest limits of Platonic friendship. And then there was your bonny lass—may God forgive us for the use we put her innocence to!—forever the go-between. Yet, sir, before real harm was done, I had compounded with my conscience to break with my Clarinda once and forever. Then came your ... Do you remember your letter?''I remember a letter,' said Herries, moodily, 'in which I forbade you my cousin's house....''Ay!' cried Burns, 'and what right had you, or any fellow-creature, to hector, catechise and insult me as did you in that letter? To a man of my temper, 'twas intolerable, and every drop of black blood in my veins rose at the injury. I had the creature Nicol at my elbow, and he made me write some trash—I mind not what—to you. But the real mischief was that your ill-judged and insolent order sent me, by provocation, hot-foot to your cousin's—ay, by night, too—and we were alone.... I outstayed—indeed, I did most damnably outstay, decorum's hour—and I will not say what devil whispered in my ear ... for opportunity and the fair one both were kind. Then there comes upon us, out of her first sleep, the lassie Graham. Ecod! I see her yet—the round eyes of her, like a bairn's, staring at me; the flounces of her night-rail, her bare bit feet. Up she comes, and takes the woman from my very arms into her own, as had she been an infant, showing me the door the while wi' the gait o' a queen. 'Od, 'tis not often Robbie Burns has played so poor a part in an affair of that kind! I e'en slunk out o' the house like a whipped tyke wi' his tail atween his legs. And so the lass better'd me—and maybe saved the honour of your house. And for all reward you cast her off!' Herries had turned from white to red, and from red to white again, during this recital. But now his eyes glittered with a cold anger.'You are utterly unjust as to my part in the affair,' he said deliberately. 'Your own letter, which you slur over so easily, was a tissue of falsehood—if what you now tell me be true—and it was written with intent to mislead me. Every word and every act of my cousin's was studied to the same end. I was hedged in with lies. Of those who wronged Miss Graham, I certainly was not the guilty one; I utterly deny it. I was the catspaw of others infinitely unscrupulous. If I did Miss Graham an injustice, I deeply deplore it; but I was not responsible.' Burns eyed the speaker long and curiously—ironically, indeed.'The legal mind, I see, sir, lights on the cold justice of the case at once, and banishes emotion and romance,' he said. 'Let me tell you, here and now, how I repent my part in the unlucky business. The letter I sent you was Nicol's, in truth, and not mine. In a sober mood I'd not have lent myself to such a trick; but I was drunk, and there was my disgrace. I ask your pardon, as one erring human being asks pardon of another, who, in his turn, must be a supplicant for grace before the Throne of God.... Or is Mr. Herries, indeed, above his fellows, and in no need of pity and forgiveness from above?' Herries frowned—the annoyed frown of a man to whom heroics are distasteful.'It is a Christian duty to forgive,' he said coldly. 'Your injury to me I do forgive, but your injury to another was far deeper, and confession and repentance, sir, have come a little late.''But not too late for reparation!' cried the poet, eagerly. 'Does your heart not warm again to that wronged lassie? 'Od, my own blood, that runs like ice in these congealing veins, leaps at the thought of her! I cannot get to her—I'll never see her face again—for earth will be upon these eyes, and the great darkness.... But I will bless her with the blessing of the dying—'tis all I have.... But you, sir—you—you have a horse, you've health and strength and time—a heart, I'd hope ... surely you will go to her—fly to her—losing not a day!''After a few hours' reflection,' said Herries, with a consciously exaggerated coldness, 'I shall be the better judge of how to act. In the meantime, although I do not doubt your statement, I should like proof positive that your memory does not play you false.''Most noble judge!' said Burns, with bitter irony, 'it shall be yours! The sacred pages of my Clarinda's letters will be proof-positive enough in all conscience, and you shall see them. They are safe with you. I'll have the packet searched for, and to-morrow, if you will trouble to call, it shall be delivered to your hands.''To-morrow,' said Herries, 'I shall be absent at B—— on the Duke's business, and perhaps for two days; but on my return I will do myself the honour to call.''I may not be here,' said Burns, significantly. 'But, no matter, the letters will be ready.' He paused. The two men looked at each other in silence—antipathetic to the last—across a gulf of mutual misunderstanding, that not years of speech or explanation could have bridged over. The ardent and impulsive temperament of Burns might indeed have leapt the chasm, and he longed even now for a reconciliation with the man he had wronged—a reconciliation with warm, heartfelt words, and a clasp of the hand. But to Herries, hedged about with the prejudices of a lifetime—to Herries, just, but cold—even the semblance of reconciliation was impossible. It was Burns who spoke next, in a gentler voice, and with a kindly shrewdness in his eyes.'How well it would be, sir,' he said, 'could nature sometimes mix her handiwork! Had I, now, some of your excellent qualities of judgment and coolness, how much more wisely should I have waged the war of life! And you, methinks, might be a little better for a few drops of the hot blood that has been the plague of me all my days. But we are as God made us, and the Devil spoiled us, and to make or mar is seemingly little in our own power.' The poet's voice had become fainter, and the excitement which had upheld him throughout the interview began to wane. His excessive weakness became apparent, as he leaned back against the pillows, with closing eyes. Herries came nearer to him for the first time.'You have stretched a great point for me, Mr. Burns,' he said, 'in that you have undertaken this interview when you were so little able to bear the strain. I admire your fortitude, and I beg to thank you for the unselfish effort. I see how it has worn you out, and I will leave you now, and call your nurse.' The poet opened his eyes, and fixed them on the younger man with an indescribably yearning look.'I would do better now,' he said, 'to pray than to preach! There is one prayer for us all, Mr. Herries—for you—for me: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors!"''Amen!' said Herries, with the first ring of emotion in his voice. Then, with a deep inclination, he silently left the room.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
The letter which Nicol had conveyed from Burns to Herries lay unopened at the office of the latter for a matter of about, perhaps, thirty-six hours. Delivered very late in the evening, it was not conveyed to Herries that night, because he had already retired. In the early morning hours he was summoned to the death-bed of his partner, and he only returned from that melancholy scene in order, after a hurried meal, to set off to a remote village in the Pentlands, where, under an engagement with the dead man, he must make arrangements for the funeral. Returning at night, dog-tired, after many hours spent in the saddle (for it had been necessary to go on horseback), he had not then attempted to examine his correspondence. But the first letter that he opened in the morning was that from St. James's Square.
He sat still after its perusal—stunned. The morning sun streamed in through the three long windows of his fine room, and found him, perhaps on hour later, still sitting motionless, the letter in his hand. The anguish of surprise was not his, for, after all, the letter contained mere confirmation of long-latent suspicion. But it came as a fearful blow nevertheless. Here was a man who had expected little of men and women, but he had got less than he expected after all. He had believed that he had cherished no illusions, and dreamed no dreams; but the modest hopes that he had allowed himself to entertain of faith in one human being, whom he loved, were dashed. The cynic's disgust, as well as the man's heart-wrung sorrow, was his portion.
Yet Herries was a lawyer, keen of vision, and trained in the detection of deceit, and to him that letter actually did smack false at the first reading, and afterwards also. He had heard much, as was inevitable, of the sturdy independence of the peasant poet; certainly this letter was not the letter of such a man. It was a suspiciously subservient, an actually cringing letter, and in every line rang false. Yet Herries knew, and recognised at once, the poet's handwriting; for Burns's letters at that day were often handed round the town as curiosities, and the young lawyer had seen at least a score. A certain wearied languor had come over Herries, numbing his faculties, so that in this matter they had almost ceased to serve him. He told himself that his love was dead—nipped by this long frost of cold suspicion, and ruined forever by this base association with men and ways unclean and devious. Yet he was a just man, and he would not condemn Alison unheard. He had already given her the chance of explanation and defence; he would give it her again. He would seek her out, and he would confront her with the letter—ask her if it were true or false. He would make her speak; and those grave lips that he had kissed so often: those candid eyes—that indescribably childlike wide innocence of brow that had been Alison's charm, rather than and (to him) beyond all beauty—well, he should learn once for all if they lied, and were only the fair outer covering of deceit and blackness. It was impossible that he could be absent again during office hours, for the previous day had been a blank one, and the pressure of the accumulated work of the past weeks was becoming daily more unendurable. But in the evening he would go to the Potterrow, and put an end to the mysteries that destroyed his peace.
He set out, accordingly, after he had dined. It was a damp, windy night, with heavy rain-clouds hurrying from the west. Hardly an hour before him Alison had trod those pavements, her face set to the New Town, trying to hide herself as she went. Herries walked with his head held high, conning over the stringent things that he should say in the coming interview, yet striving also that he should be just and calm. Jean opened to him with a glum face. Well did the honest servant know that things were going wrong. Her sympathies were all with Alison.
'I have business with Miss Graham,' said Herries. 'Can I see her?'
'I doot no, sir,' said Jean. 'The young leddy is from home, and the mistress ill in her bed.'
'I will come in and wait,' said Herries; 'but do not you disturb your mistress—it is not necessary.' He felt a repugnance to seeing his cousin; more lies, he told himself, and impotent anger on his own part, would be the only result.
He walked into the parlour. The little room had an ominously neglected and inhospitable air; the fire was nearly out, and the hard, lingering light of the spring evening showed up all the shabbinesses of the little nest, so kindly hid in the cosy winter hours. Herries threw himself into a chair, prepared to wait. Half-an-hour dragged by and no one came. The demon of restlessness got him, and he began to pace the room. He thought he would see Nancy after all, and called Jean.
'Ask my cousin if she can see me,' he said, and at the same moment Nancy's voice called to him faintly from her room. He entered it.
The invalid lay against a pile of pillows, in her pink wrapper, looking, indeed, merely the ghost of herself. Her cheeks were pallid, her dark eyes ringed, the lines upon her face were visibly deepened.
'Why, Nancy, I find you an invalid!' said Herries, in astonishment. 'I fear I intrude; but my business is with Miss Graham to-night, and if you can tell me where she is gone, or when she is likely to return, I will not disturb you a moment longer.'
Nancy trembled, for all the terrors of discovery beset her. The courage to answer her cousin coherently was not in her; her quivering lips would hardly form her words.
'Ally is—is gone out,' she murmured. 'She did not tell me where. A walk with Willy is her custom at this hour, and—'
'It is past seven o'clock,' said Herries, impatiently, 'and Willy is in the kitchen with his books.' He frowned, and his eyes, full of freshly-roused suspicion, searched Nancy's face. But a man cannot bully a sick woman in her bed.
'I shall wait for Miss Graham,' he said shortly, as he turned on his heel, 'if need be, till midnight.' He returned to the parlour, where Jean had lit a candle, and continued his watch. Nancy, on her bed, tossed to and fro, a prey to perfect agony of mind. It was more than two hours since Alison had left the house. What had become of her? Here was Herries on the trail of some discovery. The wretched little woman saw herself upon the brink of ruin. She rolled over on her face, biting the sheet between her chattering teeth, stiff and cold, and in a kind of rigour.
In a rage of obstinacy, Herries waited on. The wag-at-the-wall clock struck eight—the half-hour—then nine. He started up, and went to the servant in her kitchen.
'Jean,' he said, and his voice had a curiously unnatural sound, 'I cannot get from your mistress where Miss Graham is gone. Can you tell me?' The woman hesitated, and then spoke out, bursting, indeed, with a sense of Alison's wrongs, though about, alas! only to add to them.
'Gone?' she said. 'Weel ken I whar she's gone! Just where she's been too often, sir, though I say it that am but a sairvant—'
'Take care what you do say,' said Herries, sternly. 'I have ears for no idle gossip. Where did she go?'
'To Burns's lodging, sir,' said Jean, setting fire to a long trail, 'and, sir—'
'That's enough,' said Herries. His voice was quiet, but his action was like lightning, and, before the slow-moving Scotchwoman could put out a hand to stop him, or utter another word, he was out upon the stair and in the street, making for St. James's Square as though the devil were after him.
His haste undid him. Had he waited but a moment more, the flood-gates of Jean's confidence would have been opened wide, and from the honest creature's lips he would have learnt, if not the whole truth, yet enough to light him to the rest. But that was not to be.
CHAPTER XL.
There is no ground for supposing that during his Edinburgh sojourn, Robert Burns succumbed to those habits of intemperance which afterwards destroyed him. It was an age of drink, and he no doubt drank, as did nearly all his contemporaries, immoderately at times. But there is much to show that in these days he was sober in his habits, for the most part, and no record whatever that he disgraced himself by conspicuous over-indulgence. The end of his visit, however, was inevitably a time of trial in this respect. There were farewell visits to be paid to many a roystering character and tavern companion; and the nature of such farewells can easily be imagined, along with their result. On the day succeeding his last visit to the Potterrow, Burns drank heavily, impelled thereto by impulses less agreeable than those of mere good-fellowship. When he turned into his lodging, which he did only a few minutes before Herries reached the door, he was very drunk indeed.
He stumbled upstairs to the parlour. Nicol was there, and made him some excited communication, pointing to the inner door. But the festive condition of the Bard made him hopelessly dense to oral instruction. He had not a notion what his excited friend was talking about.
'Man, pull yourself together,' cried Nicol, eagerly, hearing a knock from below, and running to the window. 'As I'm alive, here's our cock o' the walk seeking his bonny hen.'
'Who?' said the poet, confusedly.
'Herries, man, Herries!' shouted Nicol, slapping his thigh. 'The little lawyer body ye were to lick. Wheesht! here he comes.'
'My enemy!' said the Bard, grandiloquently, with a dim feeling that a great occasion was upon him. He half-sat, half-propped himself upon the corner of the table, with arms folded across his chest. He was ruddy with wine; his jet black hair was spread upon his brow; in the fine blue and buff of his best suit, with his magnificent shoulders, his grand head and lowering eye—it was impossible to deny, drunken though he was, the splendour of his presence. To him, thus, and to Nicol, was ushered Herries, white with anger, and a terrible vital excitement.
Herries walked straight to the figure on the table.
'Where—where is she?' he said, but he was hardly audible, for his throat was parched. The poet lurched a little, but steadied himself with an inimitable air of tipsy gravity.
'Speak up, ma billy!' he said. 'I'm dull the day.'
'I ask you—and you know it—where is Miss Graham?' said Herries, with clenching hands.
The poet cocked an eyebrow.
'Nae man speirs at me for glaikit lasses,' he observed virtuously; 'you are come to the wrong shop.'
Nicol burst into a coarse guffaw.
'Nay, sir,' he said, 'you are come right enough, though Rob, here, is too modest to admit it. We hae your bonny bird safe and sound.... Here, mistress, come out now! there's ain to fetch you—' He flung open the bedroom door, close to which he had stood, with his hand upon the lock, since Herries's entry. And out of the dark room into the light one walked Alison Graham.
Her face, her neck, her very hands, were white: they were drenched with whiteness, so that she seemed more dead than alive; and the lines of her face were drawn so deep, that it had suddenly lost the roundness and the air of youth. Her wild eyes went from face to face with a hunted look; the light hurt them, and she raised her hand, but it fell powerless, while her look riveted itself at last on her lover.
'Alison!' said Herries. 'How ... how ...' But he could not speak. Yet justice should be hers—that thought printed itself in fiery letters on his reeling brain. Here—no matter that it was before these men, before them or before the world—he would ask her why she stood there, and let her clear herself if she could.
'Alison,' he said, going close up to her, 'whose shame is this—yours or another's?'
Alison's eyes looked round the room in a vain search for help. They fell on Nicol, who, crassly ignorant of the real circumstances of her case, could hardly have helped her, and certainly would not if he could. They fell on Burns, but Burns was drunk, and had he been sober, must sooner have protected the woman he had nearly ruined than helpless Alison. Alison's eyes fell to the ground, and all the long struggle of the past weeks concentrated itself in the anguish of one moment's swift decision. Her happiness, or Nancy's honour—which?
Her chin sank upon her breast: she seemed to shrink—the image of shame.
'I ... I have deceived you, sir,' she stammered, with lips that scarcely moved.
It was the truth, but so little of it, and so hopelessly perverted! Alison raised her eyes to her lover's face, and he should have read the real truth in them, but he was blind.
'That's enough,' was all he said. 'I have asked and you have answered. On your own head be it!'
For a few seconds no one moved in the dead silence. The poet, half asleep, with his chin upon his chest, lurched and swayed, now one way, and now another. Herries's eyes flamed, as they looked at him, with the cold flame of disgust and hate.
'Your host is drunk,' he said to Alison, almost cavalierly. He had become icily cool, and the crisp tones of his business manner came to him, as though he stood in his own orderly office with a client in front of him. 'I cannot leave you here, you understand,' he continued, addressing her; 'you are in my relative's care, and I am her representative. You must leave this house—for the present, at least—and leave it with me.' He went to the door, and opened it, with a gesture that seemed to command rather than to solicit her exit. No one interfered, not even Nicol moved or spoke. With bowed head, Alison walked slowly from the room. And as she did so, the swaying figure of Burns, supine, fell prostrate on the table in a drunken sleep.
Out of doors it was raining, pouring with rain out of the black night sky. Neither Alison nor her companion could shelter themselves, and the gusty wind blew in their bent faces as they struggled along. A link-boy's torch flashed at the corner of the square, and at the end of Princes Street there was a pack of chairmen sheltering under a wall, for it was an Assembly night.
'I will see you under shelter and in safety,' said Herries, speaking for the first time. 'But after that I can never willingly see your face again. Do you understand?' He had to raise his voice against the wind and the hiss and patter of the rain.
'I understand,' said Alison; 'I expected nothing else,' she added proudly. Yet the pride was for him, not herself.Hetake that which was smirched and spoiled? Not a fair one, but the fairest of all, must be his, and how could she ever be fairest again—even though Herries should know all—stained to the soul as she felt, after those destroying, those damning hours in the squalid chamber of a libertine? It would be a relief, she thought, to part. Oh, let him go! let him go!
He called a chair and handed her into it, punctiliously instructing and paying the chairman. How it stabbed Alison that he should do this now. How often, in the happy dealings of a man with a girlish guest, he had paid such little sums on her behalf. But all that was over and done with. And in the pelting rain, and in the dark, wordless they parted.
Alison felt in her pocket for Nancy's key. At least she had that and her friend should be safe. She had seen it among a lot of untidy litter on a table in her prison, and had had the sense and courage to take it. That must be her reward.
* * * * *
At midnight, a white figure stood at Nancy's bedside. It was Alison, with a light in her hand. After a brief and curiously dry account of her adventure on her return home, she had gone to her room, but it was not to sleep.
'Nancy,' she now said, 'I'm going home!' Nancy sat up in her bed.
'Home, child?' she cried. 'What do you mean? Oh—no—no! You'd never leave me in my misery! You are frightened and upset. 'Twas an odious adventure—some trick of that beast Nicol. But to-morrow you'll be yourself again, Ally—my strength and comfort—my only one!'
'I got you the key,' said Alison, doggedly. 'I—I have done what I could. But now I'm going home, and you must not prevent me.'
Nancy burst into tears.
'Oh—Ally!' she sobbed, 'there's something between us!'
'Yes,' said Alison, dully, 'there's something between me and all the world from to-day. But I'll go home and hide myself—and forget. You'll not rise, Nancy,' she went on, 'for I've been to Jean and she will help me away. The coach goes at five—to-morrow is the day for it, you know, and I could not wait another week. I'll come in and say good-bye before I go.' Nancy turned her face to the wall, and sobbed and wept. But Alison's eyes were dry.
A few hours later she stood in Nancy's room again, in the grey dawn, hooded and cloaked for her journey. But her little friend had drugged herself into a deep sleep, and Alison did not wake her. In one of her tiny hands—the hand that had loaded Alison with easy kindness and covered her with a blame and shame not hers—was clasped the unlucky key. She breathed deeply and peacefully with parted lips—those lips made for laughter and for love—the swollen eyelids fringed and closed, the dark hair scattered on the pillow. Alison stood and looked at her long, without resentment, without love, without feeling of any kind, for feeling was numb with her now. Then she turned away, and went and kissed Willy in his sleep. And there were no other farewells.
'I doubt you are leaving us in trouble, Miss Ally!' said kindly Jean. She stood at the coach door—the March wind scattering the scanty locks upon her rough, broad forehead—loth to part from the young lady she had liked and served through all these winter weeks.
'Yes, Jean,' said Alison, sadly,' good-bye.'
'But, oo—it'll a' win richt i' the end?' said the cheerful woman, tentatively.
'No—never!' answered Alison, with the tremendous finality of youth.
The horn sounded, the whip cracked, and the lumbering vehicle lurched on its way. And so Alison went back to The Mains.
CHAPTER XLI.
It might have been about eight o'clock the next morning when Lizzie, the old housekeeper in George Street, thrust her head in at her master's door.
'Maircy me!' she exclaimed, and there was some cause for her wonder in the sight, at that hour, of candles burning in the broad day, and Herries at his desk, where, indeed, he had been all night.
Sleep had left him and thought had become intolerable. With an effort almost superhuman he had determined to lose himself in the technicalities of his work, and he had done it. But he now looked, with bloodshot eyes, his tumbled linen and disordered hair, the living image of dissipation rather than business. Lizzie eyed him most suspiciously. He never drank, but the censorious old woman believed he had been drinking.
'The Lord be gude to us!' she ejaculated, 'what's wrang? Wastin' waxen candles this gait!' And she blew them out, and snuffed them with her fingers. 'You're wanted,' she went on. 'There's a lad frae Creighton's wi' a message express. Ye maun gang there at aince anent the dog.'
'What about the dog?' said Herries.
'Weel,' said Lizzie, 'as far as I can get it frae the lad, the tyke is turned upon them all, and aye he sits girning by the corp, and they canna get it coffined. They're for you to gang and fleech him awa', or somethin' that gait.'
'I will come,' said Herries.
Creighton's unfortunate canine companion had given some trouble already, which Herries had not grudged. Within the hour of his master's death, when it was necessary that the last offices should be done, Herries had coaxed the poor starving brute from his post upon the bed, tempting him with a piece of meat. But no sooner was the morsel swallowed than the creature ran back to the room of death, and scratching at the door, pushed in and leapt upon the bed. Nothing had since dislodged him, and Herries had ordered him to be left in peace—a solitary mourner. It had been a mistaken kindness, for thirst had probably now turned the beast rabid. Herries took a pistol out of its case, and primed and loaded it. For Dick there could only be the kindly ultimatum of a bullet.
He went straight to Mr. Creighton's lodgings. It was the same March morning, windy, but now fair, which was seeing Alison on her sad way home. The wind cut him like a knife, though it was not really cold. He had eaten nothing for many hours, and a wretchedness of spirit was upon him, beyond anything that he had deemed it possible he could know.
In Creighton's room the coffin stood upon its trestles, and stiff and still, beneath the sheet upon the bed, lay its belated occupant. At the starkly upturned feet crouched the terrier, his red eyes glowing like cinders, at every slightest sound or movement drawing his lips back from his teeth in a rabid snarl. Herries approached him, with a half hope the dog would know him and be pacified, but the brute would have sprung at him in a moment. He drew back sufficiently far to take a deliberate and steady aim.
The shot rang out with terrific reverberation within the narrow, echoing limits of the empty room, which filled instantly with a blue and pungent smoke. When that cleared off, Herries perceived the dog had hardly moved, arrested in his crouching attitude by swift death. Presently a single scarlet trickle from behind his ear stained the whiteness of his master's shroud, his fierce eye dimmed and glazed, and his bristling body stiffened as it lay.
Herries, the smoking pistol in his hand, stood still a moment—in his disordered dress, and with his pale, set face and bloodshot eyes, a singularly haunting image of the suicide. But just as some men, too strong to swoon, must bear a physical agony to its last limit, so to Herries, with the accurately-balanced character of his intellect and his temper, the impulse of self-destruction could never come. He must bear, he would overcome: the iron will survived; the brain, active and restless, keen and clear, worked on—a finely-regulated mechanism. But his heart was empty, and from that moment he closed its portals on the world.
* * * * *
CHAPTER XLII.
Time, who is the great healer, does his work with admirable celerity for some. By the spring of that year, though there came to her in the early weeks of April the astounding news of Burns's marriage to Jean Armour, Mrs. Maclehose had resumed the peaceful tenor of her blameless existence as a cruelly deserted wife and anxious mother. This little vessel, so lightly rigged, so fairy-like, with sails and pennants spread for none but summer breezes, had encountered rough weather, but had survived with wonderfully little hurt. Helmsman and pilot, perchance, had suffered, and an honest seaman or so gone by the board; but the spirit of the little ship, undaunted, rode lightly on the calm. The little Edinburgh world of Mrs. Maclehose's acquaintances observed with edification her devotion to her delicate youngest boy. She, indeed, moved herself and her small household to Prestonpans for a season, where he lay. In the August of that year little Danny died, and it may be said most truthfully that no child ever winged his way from earth to heaven from tenderer maternal arms.
For all the rest of Nancy's doings are they not written in more books than one, so that he who runs may read? It is to be conjectured that her relations with her cousin became tacitly somewhat strained after the events recorded in this history, although there was no open quarrel. It seems probable that Herries, after Danny's death, and in the hardness of heart which grew upon him at this time, withdrew the superfluities, at anyrate, of the monetary assistance he had been in the habit of conveying to his relative.
This may have been one of the contributing causes to the curious impulse which, about the autumn of the year '91, moved Nancy to think of rejoining her long-lost husband, and induced her to undertake a voyage to the West Indies with that laudable end in view. The journey was not a success. She, indeed, found Mr. Maclehose with little difficulty, but she found along with him the partner of his exile, a swarthy lady of those climes, with a numerous coffee-colored progeny. And this discovery so shocked the moral sensibilities of the little lady, who had regarded with a lenient eye the amorous delinquencies of her Sylvander, that she incontinently fled the marital premises, and returned to Leith in the same vessel that had brought her out. The most remarkable feature of this episode is the fact that Robert Burns, although at this time nearly three years married, did indubitably come to Edinburgh to seek a farewell interview with his Clarinda. How they two met, with what feelings, with what memories, who shall be bold enough to say? The world, at least, became infinitely the richer for this parting and for poor Clarinda's absence. For the poet's soul was stirred, and soon fine Edinburgh ladies at the harp and spinet, and country lasses at their milking, were singing, to its melting air,—
'Now in her green mantle blythe Nature arrays,And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes,While birds warble welcome in ilka green show,But to me it's delightless—my Nannie's awa'.The snaw-drap and primrose our woodlands adorn,And violets bathe in the weet o' the morn;They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blow,They mind me o' Nannie—and Nannie's awa'.Thou lav'rock that springs frae the dews o' the lawn,The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn;And thou mellow mavis that hails the night-fa'Give over for pity—my Nannie's awa'.'
'Now in her green mantle blythe Nature arrays,And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes,While birds warble welcome in ilka green show,But to me it's delightless—my Nannie's awa'.
'Now in her green mantle blythe Nature arrays,
And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes,
While birds warble welcome in ilka green show,
But to me it's delightless—my Nannie's awa'.
The snaw-drap and primrose our woodlands adorn,And violets bathe in the weet o' the morn;They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blow,They mind me o' Nannie—and Nannie's awa'.
The snaw-drap and primrose our woodlands adorn,
And violets bathe in the weet o' the morn;
They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blow,
They mind me o' Nannie—and Nannie's awa'.
Thou lav'rock that springs frae the dews o' the lawn,The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn;And thou mellow mavis that hails the night-fa'Give over for pity—my Nannie's awa'.'
Thou lav'rock that springs frae the dews o' the lawn,
The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn;
And thou mellow mavis that hails the night-fa'
Give over for pity—my Nannie's awa'.'
And also of this curious farewell were born those lines in which is reached, perhaps, the very topmost summit of the lyrical genius of Burns—those lines which are the epitome of all love-tragedy—of all hopeless passion—of all parting woe. And these shall the painstaking reader, who toils to the end of this history, read on the last page for his reward.
Sylvander and Clarinda continued to correspond with considerable desultoriness during the few years of life that remained to the Rhymer, and sad to state, in these communications there is to be traced a very decided recriminative tartness, which is a blow to the ingenuous and sentimental reader. So sputtered out, in rather fiery sparks—as, indeed, is the too common wont of such—one of the most curious of the world's classic flirtations.
Mrs. Maclehose lived to a great age, becoming a mostespiègleand charming old lady—the centre of a large and admiring acquaintance. Years after the poet's death, when all danger was over, and passion, too, dead, it was her chief boast, her 'meed of fame,' to figure as Burns's 'Clarinda.' She kept, and would exhibit, many little souvenirs of the Bard, and on all matters pertaining to the history of his Edinburgh visits, she was for many years the greatest living authority. She publicly and impartially would maintain till the last that the poet's marriage with a peasant was the greatest mistake of his life, dragging him down to a low level, intellectually as well as socially; whereas with higher companionship he might have risen to heights incalculably nobler, both of prosperity and of fame. To her dying day she expressed a pious wish that she might meet in heaven the Bard whose soul she felt that she alone had understood as it deserved in the imperfect communionship of earth. All things considered, the hope of meeting in quite another quarter might have seemed more justifiable. But so—exit our charming Nancy from these veracious pages.
To Herries, meanwhile, in his house in George Street, these years brought solitary success and lonely gain. He set himself to his work with an iron determination to forget the past, and it seemed that he succeeded. To him Alison Graham was dead, as truly dead as though she lay in yonder graveyard under the shadow of the Castle rock, with a great stone to weight her down until the Judgment Day. He never thought of her at all. He never pictured his room now as a drawing-room, with gracious feminine appurtenances; it was the office, pure and simple. In Creighton's room below worked his new partner, a young and stirring man. The business extended itself in all directions and flourished like a miracle. Some of the most resounding names in Scotland figured on the green tin boxes, in their yearly increasing phalanx, in Herries's room. He had the name of a hard man, and was, no doubt, rather feared than loved. But so he willed it—for he had had enough of love. Round him, in these busy years, grew wider and yet wider the gallant New Town of Edinburgh—curving into crescents, and widening into squares and handsome residential streets. More and more, the genteel world gravitated to this quarter, and left the Old Town to the squalor of decay. Herries, for one, never visited the old streets and closes—giving in, no doubt, to the new fashion. The High Street was his limit; the devious and narrow ways which led to the Potterrow knew him no more.
And meanwhile, down in the rich south country, in the little white farmhouse among the broom, on the bonny banks of Nith, Robert Burns pursued the downward tenor of his way. Poet and exciseman, farmer and bard: the kindly husband and father, the incorrigible rake: the eager host, the far too frequent—and far, far too uproariously welcomed—guest: the copious correspondent, the ill-balanced politician: the reckless, eager, revolutionary spirit, the remorse-stricken, disappointed, penitent man; at once affectionate and quarrelsome—losing friend after friend, and tiring out the patience of men and women who would fain have befriended him to the last; quixotically generous in money matters, refusing money for his songs, and then forced to accept, in grinding bitterness of spirit, the eleemosynary five-pound note under pressure of inexorable necessity—so he stands out, a tragic figure for all time, the presiding genius, the Rhymer of the North. Too soon the fair page—or that which had promised so fair—of the life at Elliesland had to be turned down, the stock and plenishing of the little farm scattered and sold, and the patient Jean and her little flock of helpless bairns made to flit sadly to Dumfries. Here the temptations of the country town and its taverns soon finished what the too trying and demoralising routine of the Excise had begun; and in the squalor of excess—in sadness, illness, disillusionment and pain—the shining light of genius grew dim, and flickered to extinction.
CHAPTER XLIII.
As time went on, and his fortune accumulated, there came to Archibald Herries that impulse which generally visits the laborious and land-loving Scot at some period of his career—the impulse to possess himself of territorial acres—the ancestral ones if possible. The family from which Herries sprang had owned land in the Galloway region, or near about Kirkcudbright. It occurred to him suddenly, in the summer of '96, when town was empty, and the grass growing up between the cobbles of the Edinburgh streets, after its rural wont, that he would take a tour in the South and re-visit the country of his sires. He set out with a couple of good nags—one ridden by his servant, with a pack-saddle.
It was a successful expedition (all worldly matters prospered with Herries in these days), and in more ways than in mere pleasure. Not only did he see the country to advantage in the fine summer weather, but he discovered that a small property, with its excellent mansion house, which had once been the ancient possession of a younger branch of his family, was for sale. There seemed no reason—certainly not want of funds—why he should not become the purchaser. It might have occurred to him to ask himself why he, unmarried and childless, should burden himself with acres never to become an inheritance. But no such consideration gave him pause. He was inwardly determined that, at the first moment he thought fit to do so, he should marry—ay, and beget sons to carry on his name and fame. True, that moment had never come; but it was not for love's sake that it tarried—or so he was convinced.
It was on his return journey that he stayed for a few nights at Dumfries. With his pleasure-trip he had combined a certain modicum of business, and the affairs of an important client detained him in the country-town longer than he meant. In the long, summer evenings he would stroll about the streets, losing himself in its little vennels and closes, and stopping every now and then to stare about him, as a man will in a place that is strange to him. That Dumfries was becoming famous as the last home of the man who had practically ruined his life, Herries may have known, but only vaguely. The fashionable world had dropped the poet Burns. The town roared over 'Tam o' Shanter' when it appeared, but forgot to pension the unlucky bard struggling with his poverty on the banks of Nith.
It was one morning, as he sat at breakfast in his tavern, that a messenger brought Herries a note. It was written in a sprawling, uncertain hand, and was unsigned, undated and unaddressed. It ran—'A dying fellow-creature uses the privilege of his sad condition to summon Mr. Herries to his house. It may be that Mr. Herries will there hear that which might be of importance to his affairs.' Herries turned the note over with an incredulous smile. Who in Dumfries could know of anything that was of importance to him? A little boy waited to guide him to the house of his correspondent. Herries thought that he would go. The mystery would help to pass an idle morning.
The child led him a little way down the hill, and guided him to a small and humble street called, as Herries observed, the Wee Vennel. They stopped before a decent two-storeyed house, like an artisan's dwelling of the better class.
'Here, my boy,' said Herries, giving the child a shilling, 'can't you tell me who it is that desires to see me?'
'No. I was not to say, sir,' answered the boy. He was a fine little fellow of about nine or ten, and as he spoke he raised his large black eyes—surely Herries had seen eyes just like these before—to the stranger's face.
The door was opened by a quiet-looking, young woman with a sweet face, but Herries did not then observe her with any particularity. She asked him gently to walk upstairs. At the door of a room opening to the left, she paused.
'You will be very quiet, will you not, sir?' she asked. 'You'll not excite him? He has not long to live.' She had a quiet, controlled, and yet a very sad voice. Herries then noticed her wedding-ring, and also the fact that she seemed very near her time. She opened the door to the sick-room, and left him.
The room was cross-lighted by two windows set in opposite walls, and by one of these, which was opened to the street and to the summer air and sunshine, was drawn a great chair, where someone sat, propped by a pile of pillows. A very pretty young girl in the rustic style sat near with an open book upon her knee, from which she had been reading aloud. She rose as Herries entered, and quietly left the room. It was Jessie Lewars, a neighbour's pretty daughter, who helped to minister to the dying poet—an innocent type of much that had been the reverse of innocent in his life—a characteristic attendant enough. Not as yet had the faintest warning reached Herries in whose presence it was that, after eight years of silent hatred, he stood. Something of awe, indeed, held him, for he recognised by instinct the atmosphere of death. But he walked up to the chair in total unsuspicion, mechanically holding out a hand. And then a voice arrested him.
'Nay, not yet, sir!' said Burns. 'Wait! When once before you met me, you held your hand behind you. It may be you'll put it back again before we've done.'
Herries started violently, and his hand dropped to his side, for now he saw and knew his enemy.
But this—this deathlike image—could it indeed be Robert Burns? The last time that Herries had seen him—that only too memorable time—he had been in the hey-day of his splendid manhood, flushed with wine and bold with license, handsome as Bacchus, careless of mankind—balancing on the corner of a table in unblushing drunkenness. Now, a spectre faced the amazed intruder—hollow-eyed and fever-haunted, the bony frame of a skeleton, the traces of death's clayey finger on cheek and temple, lip and brow. Only the eyes glowed with their wonted and sombre fire; they seemed to look Herries through and through—to read the secrets of his heart. In spite of the old hatred, and battling with the old contempt, there struggled into Herries's sensations an unwilling reverence. All through what seemed to him the fantastic interview which ensued he strove with bitterness to assert himself. But it was with the curious and baffling consciousness that a greater than himself, albeit stained with a thousand sins and follies, strove with him and held him down.
CHAPTER XLIV.
'Will you not be seated, sir?' said Burns, pointing to the chair which Jessie Lewars had vacated. Herries, with a gesture and an inclination, intimated his wish to stand; and throughout the interview he continued to do so at some little distance from the sick man, his head bent, his eyes upon the ground, save when they were raised to meet the poet's dark and penetrating gaze.
'Now, sir,' the Bard began, raising himself with difficulty in his chair, 'have patience while you listen to me. You owe me the hearing which the dying may exact from those they leave behind.'
'I will listen to you,' said Herries, shortly.
'Last night,' continued Burns; 'these two or three nights, indeed, I have seen you pass my door, unwitting; for here I sit with a sick man's look-out upon the world he must soon leave. I remembered you, and a bit of the Devil's work I did when the wine was red and ginger hot in the mouth came back to me, for it concerned your house. I have gossips in the town—too many, perhaps—and I soon heard that the great Edinburgh lawyer, Mr. Herries, was abiding at the "Globe," alone, but for his servant. Now, why alone?' The questioner's dark eye rested upon Herries's with a look half quizzical, half sombre.
'Where is man's God-given companion—where is the wife, sir?'
'I have no wife,' said Herries, sternly, most bitterly resenting the allusion to his private matters—yet, somehow, held by the overpowering personality of his interlocutor.
'What?' cried Burns. 'Then where is the lass that you loved—for you did love her—the big, bonny body wi' the bunch o' curls? Well I mind her, though she liked me little!'
'If you speak of Miss Graham,' said Herries, his lips hardly able to form the name, 'I have never seen her or heard of her since the night I took her from your house.'
'Man alive!' ejaculated the poet, staring at his guest in blank astonishment. 'Is it possible? That there was a mischief brewing through some trickery of that sour devil, Nicol, I knew—fu' though I was, and roarin' fu' that night. But, as I live, I never thought but that you and the lass would kiss and make it up or ever you got the length of Princes Street!'
'Was I to take a sweetheart from your chamber?' said Herries, with a sneer.
'But, surely,' cried Burns, 'surely you knew the lass was there against her will? She had come on some cantrip of my Clarinda—well, I must e'en be plain, your cousin, Mrs. Maclehose; we had some trifle of dalliance in those days, and your girl was Cupid's messenger—just once too often, it would seem.'
'But she as good as told me with her own lips,' said Herries, 'that the disgrace of her situation was her own, and that she had deceived me....'
'Then she lied!' said Burns, energetically, 'and lied to save her friend, who was indeed most particularly in terror that your honour's self should scent her little game.... Listen, sir. I was never one to tell when I had kissed, but I must e'en out with it now. Here's a grave matter that needs more clearing even than I thought—and your own relative's honour is surely as safe with you as with me. The little lady thrives, I hear, on the fairest pinnacle of good fame, and you would be the last to interrupt her prosperity. But in those merry days she had a kindly eye for a poor Bard—and troth, so had the Bard for her—and we had—well, sundry tender passages and letters, though all within the strictest limits of Platonic friendship. And then there was your bonny lass—may God forgive us for the use we put her innocence to!—forever the go-between. Yet, sir, before real harm was done, I had compounded with my conscience to break with my Clarinda once and forever. Then came your ... Do you remember your letter?'
'I remember a letter,' said Herries, moodily, 'in which I forbade you my cousin's house....'
'Ay!' cried Burns, 'and what right had you, or any fellow-creature, to hector, catechise and insult me as did you in that letter? To a man of my temper, 'twas intolerable, and every drop of black blood in my veins rose at the injury. I had the creature Nicol at my elbow, and he made me write some trash—I mind not what—to you. But the real mischief was that your ill-judged and insolent order sent me, by provocation, hot-foot to your cousin's—ay, by night, too—and we were alone.... I outstayed—indeed, I did most damnably outstay, decorum's hour—and I will not say what devil whispered in my ear ... for opportunity and the fair one both were kind. Then there comes upon us, out of her first sleep, the lassie Graham. Ecod! I see her yet—the round eyes of her, like a bairn's, staring at me; the flounces of her night-rail, her bare bit feet. Up she comes, and takes the woman from my very arms into her own, as had she been an infant, showing me the door the while wi' the gait o' a queen. 'Od, 'tis not often Robbie Burns has played so poor a part in an affair of that kind! I e'en slunk out o' the house like a whipped tyke wi' his tail atween his legs. And so the lass better'd me—and maybe saved the honour of your house. And for all reward you cast her off!' Herries had turned from white to red, and from red to white again, during this recital. But now his eyes glittered with a cold anger.
'You are utterly unjust as to my part in the affair,' he said deliberately. 'Your own letter, which you slur over so easily, was a tissue of falsehood—if what you now tell me be true—and it was written with intent to mislead me. Every word and every act of my cousin's was studied to the same end. I was hedged in with lies. Of those who wronged Miss Graham, I certainly was not the guilty one; I utterly deny it. I was the catspaw of others infinitely unscrupulous. If I did Miss Graham an injustice, I deeply deplore it; but I was not responsible.' Burns eyed the speaker long and curiously—ironically, indeed.
'The legal mind, I see, sir, lights on the cold justice of the case at once, and banishes emotion and romance,' he said. 'Let me tell you, here and now, how I repent my part in the unlucky business. The letter I sent you was Nicol's, in truth, and not mine. In a sober mood I'd not have lent myself to such a trick; but I was drunk, and there was my disgrace. I ask your pardon, as one erring human being asks pardon of another, who, in his turn, must be a supplicant for grace before the Throne of God.... Or is Mr. Herries, indeed, above his fellows, and in no need of pity and forgiveness from above?' Herries frowned—the annoyed frown of a man to whom heroics are distasteful.
'It is a Christian duty to forgive,' he said coldly. 'Your injury to me I do forgive, but your injury to another was far deeper, and confession and repentance, sir, have come a little late.'
'But not too late for reparation!' cried the poet, eagerly. 'Does your heart not warm again to that wronged lassie? 'Od, my own blood, that runs like ice in these congealing veins, leaps at the thought of her! I cannot get to her—I'll never see her face again—for earth will be upon these eyes, and the great darkness.... But I will bless her with the blessing of the dying—'tis all I have.... But you, sir—you—you have a horse, you've health and strength and time—a heart, I'd hope ... surely you will go to her—fly to her—losing not a day!'
'After a few hours' reflection,' said Herries, with a consciously exaggerated coldness, 'I shall be the better judge of how to act. In the meantime, although I do not doubt your statement, I should like proof positive that your memory does not play you false.'
'Most noble judge!' said Burns, with bitter irony, 'it shall be yours! The sacred pages of my Clarinda's letters will be proof-positive enough in all conscience, and you shall see them. They are safe with you. I'll have the packet searched for, and to-morrow, if you will trouble to call, it shall be delivered to your hands.'
'To-morrow,' said Herries, 'I shall be absent at B—— on the Duke's business, and perhaps for two days; but on my return I will do myself the honour to call.'
'I may not be here,' said Burns, significantly. 'But, no matter, the letters will be ready.' He paused. The two men looked at each other in silence—antipathetic to the last—across a gulf of mutual misunderstanding, that not years of speech or explanation could have bridged over. The ardent and impulsive temperament of Burns might indeed have leapt the chasm, and he longed even now for a reconciliation with the man he had wronged—a reconciliation with warm, heartfelt words, and a clasp of the hand. But to Herries, hedged about with the prejudices of a lifetime—to Herries, just, but cold—even the semblance of reconciliation was impossible. It was Burns who spoke next, in a gentler voice, and with a kindly shrewdness in his eyes.
'How well it would be, sir,' he said, 'could nature sometimes mix her handiwork! Had I, now, some of your excellent qualities of judgment and coolness, how much more wisely should I have waged the war of life! And you, methinks, might be a little better for a few drops of the hot blood that has been the plague of me all my days. But we are as God made us, and the Devil spoiled us, and to make or mar is seemingly little in our own power.' The poet's voice had become fainter, and the excitement which had upheld him throughout the interview began to wane. His excessive weakness became apparent, as he leaned back against the pillows, with closing eyes. Herries came nearer to him for the first time.
'You have stretched a great point for me, Mr. Burns,' he said, 'in that you have undertaken this interview when you were so little able to bear the strain. I admire your fortitude, and I beg to thank you for the unselfish effort. I see how it has worn you out, and I will leave you now, and call your nurse.' The poet opened his eyes, and fixed them on the younger man with an indescribably yearning look.
'I would do better now,' he said, 'to pray than to preach! There is one prayer for us all, Mr. Herries—for you—for me: "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors!"'
'Amen!' said Herries, with the first ring of emotion in his voice. Then, with a deep inclination, he silently left the room.