HowJohn passed the evening, in what windy confusion of mind, in what squalls of anger and lulls of sick collapse, in what pacing of streets and plunging into public-houses, it would profit little to relate. His misery, if it were not progressive, yet tended in no way to diminish; for in proportion as grief and indignation abated, fear began to take their place. At first, his father’s menacing words lay by in some safe drawer of memory, biding their hour. At first, John was all thwarted affection and blighted hope; next bludgeoned vanity raised its head again, with twenty mortal gashes; and the father was disowned even as he had disowned the son. What was this regular course of life, that John should have admired it? what were these clock-work virtues, from which love was absent? Kindness was the test, kindness the aim and soul; and judged by such a standard, the discarded prodigal—now rapidly drowning his sorrows and his reason in successive drams—was a creature of a lovelier morality than his self-righteous father. Yes, he was the better man; he felt it, glowed with the consciousness, and entering a public-house at the corner of Howard Place (whither he had somehow wandered) he pledged his own virtues in a glass—perhaps the fourth since his dismissal. Of that he knew nothing, keeping no account of what he did or where he went; and in the general crashing hurry of his nerves, unconscious of the approach of intoxication. Indeed, it is a question whether he were really growing intoxicated, or whether at first the spirits did not even sober him. For it was even as he drained this last glass that hisfather’s ambiguous and menacing words—popping from their hiding-place in memory—startled him like a hand laid upon his shoulder. “Crimes, hunted, the gallows.” They were ugly words; in the ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the uglier; for if some judicial error were in act against him, who should set a limit to its grossness or to how far it might be pushed? Not John, indeed; he was no believer in the powers of innocence, his cursed experience pointing in quite other ways; and his fears, once wakened, grew with every hour and hunted him about the city streets.
It was perhaps nearly nine at night; he had eaten nothing since lunch, he had drunk a good deal, and he was exhausted by emotion, when the thought of Houston came into his head. He turned, not merely to the man as a friend, but to his house as a place of refuge. The danger that threatened him was still so vague, that he knew neither what to fear nor where he might expect it; but this much at least seemed undeniable, that a private house was safer than a public inn. Moved by these counsels, he turned at once to the Caledonian Station, passed (not without alarm) into the bright lights of the approach, redeemed his portmanteau from the cloak-room, and was soon whirling in a cab along the Glasgow road. The change of movement and position, the sight of the lamps twinkling to the rear, and the smell of damp and mould and rotten straw which clung about the vehicle, wrought in him strange alternations of lucidity and mortal giddiness.
“I have been drinking,” he discovered; “I must go straight to bed, and sleep.” And he thanked Heaven for the drowsiness that came upon his mind in waves.
From one of these spells he was awakened by the stoppage of the cab; and, getting down, found himself in quite a country road, the last lamp of the suburb shining some way below, and the high walls of a garden rising before him in the dark. The Lodge (as the place was named) stood, indeed, very solitary. To the south it adjoined another house, but standing in so large a garden as to be well out of cry; on allother sides, open fields stretched upward to the woods of Corstorphine Hill, or backward to the dells of Ravelston, or downward towards the valley of the Leith. The effect of seclusion was aided by the great height of the garden walls, which were, indeed, conventual, and, as John had tested in former days, defied the climbing schoolboy. The lamp of the cab threw a gleam upon the door and the not brilliant handle of the bell.
“Shall I ring for ye?” said the cabman, who had descended from his perch, and was slapping his chest, for the night was bitter.
“I wish you would,” said John, putting his hand to his brow in one of his accesses of giddiness.
The man pulled at the handle, and the clanking of the bell replied from further in the garden; twice and thrice he did it, with sufficient intervals; in the great, frosty silence of the night the sounds fell sharp and small.
“Does he expect ye?” asked the driver, with that manner of familiar interest that well became his port-wine face; and when John had told him no, “Well, then,” said the cabman, “if ye’ll tak’ my advice of it, we’ll just gang back. And that’s disinterested, mind ye, for my stables are in the Glesgie road.”
“The servants must hear,” said John.
“Hout!” said the driver. “He keeps no servants here, man. They’re a’ in the town house; I drive him often; it’s just a kind of a hermitage this.”
“Give me the bell,” said John; and he plucked at it like a man desperate.
The clamour had not yet subsided before they heard steps upon the gravel, and a voice of singular nervous irritability cried to them through the door, “Who are you, and what do you want?”
“Alan,” said John, “it’s me—it’s Fatty—John, you know. I’m just come home, and I’ve come to stay with you.”
There was no reply for a moment, and then the door was opened.
“Get the portmanteau down,” said John to the driver.
“Do nothing of the kind,” said Alan; and then to John, “Come in here a moment. I want to speak to you.”
John entered the garden, and the door was closed behind him. A candle stood on the gravel walk, winking a little in the draughts; it threw inconstant sparkles on the clumped holly, struck the light and darkness to and fro like a veil on Alan’s features, and sent his shadow hovering behind him. All beyond was inscrutable; and John’s dizzy brain rocked with the shadow. Yet even so, it struck him that Alan was pale, and his voice, when he spoke, unnatural.
“What brings you here to-night?” he began. “I don’t want, God knows, to seem unfriendly; but I cannot take you in, Nicholson; I cannot do it.”
“Alan,” said John, “you’ve just got to! You don’t know the mess I’m in; the governor’s turned me out, and I daren’t show face in an inn, because they’re down on me for murder or something!”
“For what?” cried Alan, starting.
“Murder, I believe,” says John.
“Murder!” repeated Alan, and passed his hand over his eyes. “What was that you were saying?” he asked again.
“That they were down on me,” said John. “I’m accused of murder, by what I can make out; and I’ve really had a dreadful day of it, Alan, and I can’t sleep on the roadside on a night like this—at least, not with a portmanteau,” he pleaded.
“Hush!” said Alan, with his head on one side; and then, “Did you hear nothing?” he asked.
“No,” said John, thrilling, he knew not why, with communicated terror. “No, I heard nothing; why?” And then, as there was no answer, he reverted to his pleading: “But I say, Alan, you’ve just got to take me in. I’ll go right away to bed if you have anything to do. I seem to have been drinking; I was that knocked over. I wouldn’t turn you away, Alan, if you were down on your luck.”
“No?” returned Alan. “Neither will I you, then. Come and let’s get your portmanteau.”
The cabman was paid, and drove off down the long, lamp-lit hill, and the two friends stood on the side-walk beside the portmanteau till the last rumble of the wheels had died in silence. It seemed to John as though Alan attached importance to this departure of the cab; and John, who was in no state to criticise, shared profoundly in the feeling.
When the stillness was once more perfect, Alan shouldered the portmanteau, carried it in, and shut and locked the garden door; and then, once more, abstraction seemed to fall upon him, and he stood with his hand on the key, until the cold began to nibble at John’s fingers.
“Why are we standing here?” asked John.
“Eh?” said Alan blankly.
“Why, man, you don’t seem yourself,” said the other.
“No, I’m not myself,” said Alan; and he sat down on the portmanteau and put his face in his hands.
John stood beside him swaying a little, and looking about him at the swaying shadows, the flitting sparkles, and the steady stars overhead, until the windless cold began to touch him through his clothes on the bare skin. Even in his bemused intelligence, wonder began to awake.
“I say, let’s come on to the house,” he said at last.
“Yes, let’s come on to the house,” repeated Alan.
And he rose at once, re-shouldered the portmanteau, and, taking the candle in his other hand, moved forward to the Lodge. This was a long, low building, smothered in creepers; and now, except for some chinks of light between the dining-room shutters, it was plunged in darkness and silence.
In the hall Alan lit another candle, gave it to John, and opened the door of a bedroom.
“Here,” said he; “go to bed. Don’t mind me, John. You’ll be sorry for me when you know.”
“Wait a bit,” returned John; “I’ve got so cold withall that standing about. Let’s go into the dining-room a minute. Just one glass to warm me, Alan.”
On the table in the hall stood a glass, and a bottle with a whisky label on a tray. It was plain the bottle had been just opened, for the cork and corkscrew lay beside it.
“Take that,” said Alan, passing John the whisky, and then with a certain roughness pushed his friend into the bedroom, and closed the door behind him.
John stood amazed; then he shook the bottle, and, to his further wonder, found it partly empty. Three or four glasses were gone. Alan must have uncorked a bottle of whisky and drunk three or four glasses one after the other, without sitting down, for there was no chair, and that in his own cold lobby on this freezing night! It fully explained his eccentricities, John reflected sagely, as he mixed himself a grog. Poor Alan! He was drunk; and what a dreadful thing was drink, and what a slave to it poor Alan was, to drink in this unsociable, uncomfortable fashion! The man who would drink alone, except for health’s sake—as John was now doing—was a man utterly lost. He took the grog out, and felt hazier but warmer. It was hard work opening the portmanteau and finding his night things; and before he was undressed, the cold had struck home to him once more. “Well,” said he; “just a drop more. There’s no sense in getting ill with all this other trouble.” And presently dreamless slumber buried him.
When John awoke it was day. The low winter sun was already high in the heavens, but his watch had stopped, and it was impossible to tell the hour exactly. Ten, he guessed it, and made haste to dress, dismal reflections crowding on his mind. But it was less from terror than from regret that he now suffered; and with his regret there were mingled cutting pangs of penitence. There had fallen upon him a blow, cruel, indeed, but yet only the punishment of old misdoing; and he had rebelled and plunged into fresh sin. The rod had been used to chasten, and he had bit the chastening fingers. His father was right: John had justifiedhim; John was no guest for decent people’s houses, and no fit associate for decent people’s children. And had a broader hint been needed, there was the case of his old friend. John was no drunkard, though he could at times exceed; and the picture of Houston drinking neat spirits at his hall-table struck him with something like disgust. He hung back from meeting his old friend. He could have wished he had not come to him; and yet, even now, where else was he to turn?
These musings occupied him while he dressed, and accompanied him into the lobby of the house. The door stood open on the garden; doubtless Alan had stepped forth; and John did as he supposed his friend had done. The ground was hard as iron, the frost still rigorous; as he brushed among the hollies, icicles jingled and glittered in their fall; and wherever he went, a volley of eager sparrows followed him. Here were Christmas weather and Christmas morning duly met, to the delight of children. This was the day of reunited families, the day to which he had so long looked forward, thinking to awake in his own bed in Randolph Crescent, reconciled with all men and repeating the footprints of his youth; and here he was alone, pacing the alleys of a wintry garden and filled with penitential thoughts.
And that reminded him: why was he alone? and where was Alan? The thought of the festal morning and the due salutations reawakened his desire for his friend, and he began to call for him by name. As the sound of his voice died away, he was aware of the greatness of the silence that environed him. But for the twittering of the sparrows and the crunching of his own feet upon the frozen snow, the whole windless world of air seemed to hang over him entranced, and the stillness weighed upon his mind with a horror of solitude.
Still calling at intervals, but now with a moderated voice, he made the hasty circuit of the garden, and finding neither man nor trace of man in all its evergreen coverts,turned at last to the house. About the house the silence seemed to deepen strangely. The door, indeed, stood open as before; but the windows were still shuttered, the chimneys breathed no stain into the bright air, there sounded abroad none of that low stir (perhaps audible rather to the ear of the spirit than to the ear of the flesh) by which a house announces and betrays its human lodgers. And yet Alan must be there—Alan locked in drunken slumbers, forgetful of the return of day, of the holy season, and of the friend whom he had so coldly received and was now so churlishly neglecting. John’s disgust redoubled at the thought; but hunger was beginning to grow stronger than repulsion, and as a step to breakfast, if to nothing else, he must find and arouse the sleeper.
He made the circuit of the bedroom quarters. All, until he came to Alan’s chamber, were locked from without, and bore the marks of a long disuse. But Alan’s was a room in commission, filled with clothes, knick-knacks, letters, books, and the conveniences of a solitary man. The fire had been lit; but it had long ago burnt out, and the ashes were stone cold. The bed had been made, but it had not been slept in.
Worse and worse, then: Alan must have fallen where he sat, and now sprawled brutishly, no doubt, upon the dining-room floor.
The dining-room was a very long apartment, and was reached through a passage; so that John, upon his entrance, brought but little light with him, and must move towards the windows with spread arms, groping and knocking on the furniture. Suddenly he tripped and fell his length over a prostrate body. It was what he had looked for, yet it shocked him; and he marvelled that so rough an impact should not have kicked a groan out of the drunkard. Men had killed themselves ere now in such excesses, a dreary and degraded end that made John shudder. What if Alan were dead? There would be a Christmas Day!
By this, John had his hand upon the shutters, andflinging them back, beheld once again the blessed face of the day. Even by that light the room had a discomfortable air. The chairs were scattered, and one had been overthrown; the table-cloth, laid as if for dinner, was twitched upon one side, and some of the dishes had fallen to the floor. Behind the table lay the drunkard, still unaroused, only one foot visible to John.
But now that light was in the room, the worst seemed over; it was a disgusting business, but not more than disgusting; and it was with no great apprehension that John proceeded to make the circuit of the table: his last comparatively tranquil moment for that day. No sooner had he turned the corner, no sooner had his eyes alighted on the body, than he gave a smothered, breathless cry, and fled out of the room and out of the house.
It was not Alan who lay there, but a man well up in years, of stern countenance and iron-grey locks; and it was no drunkard, for the body lay in a black pool of blood and the open eyes stared upon the ceiling.
To and fro walked John before the door. The extreme sharpness of the air acted on his nerves like an astringent, and braced them swiftly. Presently, he not relaxing in his disordered walk, the images began to come clearer and stay longer in his fancy; and next the power of thought came back to him, and the horror and danger of his situation rooted him to the ground.
He grasped his forehead, and staring on one spot of gravel, pieced together what he knew and what he suspected. Alan had murdered some one: possibly “that man” against whom the butler chained the door in Regent Terrace; possibly another; some one at least: a human soul, whom it was death to slay and whose blood lay spilt upon the floor. This was the reason of the whisky-drinking in the passage, of his unwillingness to welcome John, of his strange behaviour and bewildered words; this was why he had started at and harped upon the name of murder; this was why he had stood and hearkened, or sat and covered hiseyes, in the black night. And now he was gone, now he had basely fled; and to all his perplexities and dangers John stood heir.
“Let me think, let me think,” he said aloud, impatiently, even pleadingly, as if to some merciless interrupter. In the turmoil of his wits, a thousand hints and hopes and threats and terrors dinning continuously in his ears, he was like one plunged in the hubbub of a crowd. How was he to remember—he, who had not a thought to spare—that he was himself the author, as well as the theatre, of so much confusion? But in hours of trial the junto of man’s nature is dissolved, and anarchy succeeds.
It was plain he must stay no longer where he was, for here was a new Judicial Error in the very making. It was not so plain where he must go, for the old Judicial Error, vague as a cloud, appeared to fill the habitable world; whatever it might be, it watched for him, full-grown, in Edinburgh; it must have had its birth in San Francisco; it stood guard, no doubt, like a dragon, at the bank where he should cash his credit; and though there were doubtless many other places, who should say in which of them it was not ambushed? No, he could not tell where he was to go; he must not lose time on these insolubilities. Let him go back to the beginning. It was plain he must stay no longer where he was. It was plain, too, that he must not flee as he was, for he could not carry his portmanteau, and to flee and leave it was to plunge deeper in the mire. He must go, leave the house unguarded, find a cab, and return—return after an absence? Had he courage for that?
And just then he spied a stain about a hand’s breadth on his trousers-leg, and reached his finger down to touch it. The finger was stained red: it was blood; he stared upon it with disgust, and awe, and terror, and in the sharpness of the new sensation fell instantly to act.
He cleansed his finger in the snow, returned into the house, drew near with hushed footsteps to the dining-room door, and shut and locked it. Then he breathed a littlefreer, for here at least was an oaken barrier between himself and what he feared. Next, he hastened to his room, tore off the spotted trousers, which seemed in his eyes a link to bind him to the gallows, flung them in a corner, donned another pair, breathlessly crammed his night-things into his portmanteau, locked it, swung it with an effort from the ground, and with a rush of relief came forth again under the open heavens.
The portmanteau, being of Occidental build, was no feather-weight; it had distressed the powerful Alan; and as for John, he was crushed under its bulk, and the sweat broke upon him thickly. Twice he must set it down to rest before he reached the gate; and when he had come so far, he must do as Alan did, and take his seat upon one corner. Here, then, he sat a while and panted; but now his thoughts were sensibly lightened; now, with the trunk standing just inside the door, some part of his dissociation from the house of crime had been effected, and the cabman need not pass the garden wall. It was wonderful how that relieved him; for the house, in his eyes, was a place to strike the most cursory beholder with suspicion, as though the very windows had cried murder.
But there was to be no remission of the strokes of fate. As he thus sat, taking breath in the shadow of the wall, and hopped about by sparrows, it chanced that his eye roved to the fastening of the door; and what he saw plucked him to his feet. The thing locked with a spring; once the door was closed, the bolt shot of itself; and without a key there was no means of entering from the road.
He saw himself compelled to one of two distasteful and perilous alternatives: either to shut the door altogether and set his portmanteau out upon the wayside, a wonder to all beholders; or to leave the door ajar, so that any thievish tramp or holiday schoolboy might stray in and stumble on the grisly secret. To the last, as the least desperate, his mind inclined; but he must first insure himself that he was unobserved. He peered out, and downthe long road: it lay dead empty. He went to the corner of the by-road that comes by way of Dean; there also not a passenger was stirring. Plainly it was, now or never, the high tide of his affairs; and he drew the door as close as he durst, slipped a pebble in the chink, and made off downhill to find a cab.
Half-way down a gate opened, and a troop of Christmas children sallied forth in the most cheerful humour, followed more soberly by a smiling mother.
“And this is Christmas Day!” thought John; and could have laughed aloud in tragic bitterness of heart.
Infront of Donaldson’s Hospital, John counted it good fortune to perceive a cab a great way off, and by much shouting and waving of his arm, to catch the notice of the driver. He counted it good fortune, for the time was long to him till he should have done for ever with the Lodge; and the farther he must go to find a cab, the greater the chance that the inevitable discovery had taken place, and that he should return to find the garden full of angry neighbours. Yet when the vehicle drew up he was sensibly chagrined to recognise the port-wine cabman of the night before. “Here,” he could not but reflect, “here is another link in the Judicial Error.”
The driver, on the other hand, was pleased to drop again upon so liberal a fare; and as he was a man—the reader must already have perceived—of easy, not to say familiar, manners, he dropped at once into a vein of friendly talk, commenting on the weather, on the sacred season, which struck him chiefly in the light of a day of liberal gratuities, on the chance which had reunited him to a pleasing customer, and on the fact that John had been (as he was pleased to call it) visibly “on the ran-dan” the night before.
“And ye look dreidful bad the-day, sir, I must say that,” he continued. “There’s nothing like a dram for ye—if ye’ll take my advice of it; and bein’ as it’s Christmas, I’m no’ saying,” he added, with a fatherly smile, “but what I would join ye mysel’.”
John had listened with a sick heart.
“I’ll give you a dram when we’ve got through,” saidhe, affecting a sprightliness which sat on him most unhandsomely, “and not a drop till then. Business first and pleasure afterwards.”
With this promise the jarvey was prevailed upon to clamber to his place and drive, with hideous deliberation, to the door of the Lodge. There were no signs as yet of any public emotion; only, two men stood not far off in talk, and their presence, seen from afar, set John’s pulses buzzing. He might have spared himself his fright, for the pair were lost in some dispute of a theological complexion, and, with lengthened upper lip and enumerating fingers, pursued the matter of their difference, and paid no heed to John.
But the cabman proved a thorn in the flesh. Nothing would keep him on his perch; he must clamber down, comment upon the pebble in the door (which he regarded as an ingenious but unsafe device), help John with the portmanteau, and enliven matters with a flow of speech, and especially of questions, which I thus condense:—
“He’ll no’ be here himsel’, will he? No? Well, he’s an eccentric man—a fair oddity—if ye ken the expression. Great trouble with his tenants, they tell me. I’ve driven the faim’ly for years. I drove a cab at his father’s waddin’. What’ll your name be?—I should ken your face. Baigrey, ye say? There were Baigreys about Gilmerton; ye’ll be one of that lot? Then this’ll be a friend’s portmantie, like? Why? Because the name upon it’s Nucholson! O, if ye’re in a hurry, that’s another job. Waverley Brig’? Are ye for away?”
So the friendly toper prated and questioned and kept John’s heart in a flutter. But to this also, as to other evils under the sun, there came a period; and the victim of circumstances began at last to rumble towards the railway terminus at Waverley Bridge. During the transit he sat with raised glasses in the frosty chill and mouldy fœtor of his chariot, and glanced out sidelong on the holiday face of things, the shuttered shops, and the crowds along thepavement, much as the rider in the Tyburn cart may have observed the concourse gathering to his execution.
At the station his spirits rose again; another stage of his escape was fortunately ended—he began to spy blue water. He called a railway porter, and bade him carry the portmanteau to the cloak-room: not that he had any notion of delay; flight, instant flight, was his design, no matter whither; but he had determined to dismiss the cabman ere he named, or even chose, his destination, thus possibly baulking the Judicial Error of another link. This was his cunning aim, and now with one foot on the roadway, and one still on the coach-step, he made haste to put the thing in practice, and plunged his hand into his trousers-pocket.
There was nothing there!
O, yes; this time he was to blame. He should have remembered, and when he deserted his blood-stained pantaloons, he should not have deserted along with them his purse. Make the most of his error, and then compare it with the punishment. Conceive his new position, for I lack words to picture it; conceive him condemned to return to that house, from the very thought of which his soul revolted, and once more to expose himself to capture on the very scene of the misdeed: conceive him linked to the mouldy cab and the familiar cabman. John cursed the cabman silently, and then it occurred to him that he must stop the incarceration of his portmanteau; that, at least, he must keep close at hand, and he returned to recall the porter. But his reflections, brief as they had appeared, must have occupied him longer than he supposed, and there was the man already returning with the receipt.
Well, that was settled; he had lost his portmanteau also; for the sixpence with which he had paid the Murrayfield Toll was one that had strayed alone into his waistcoat-pocket, and unless he once more successfully achieved the adventure of the house of crime, his portmanteau lay in the cloak-room in eternal pawn, for lack of a penny fee.And then he remembered the porter, who stood suggestively attentive, words of gratitude hanging on his lips.
John hunted right and left; he found a coin—prayed God that it was a sovereign—drew it out, beheld a halfpenny, and offered it to the porter.
The man’s jaw dropped.
“It’s only a halfpenny,” he said, startled out of railway decency.
“I know that,” said John piteously.
And here the porter recovered the dignity of man.
“Thank you, sir,” said he, and would have returned the base gratuity. But John, too, would none of it; and as they struggled, who must join in but the cabman?
“Hoots, Mr. Baigrey,” said he, “you surely forget what day it is!”
“I tell you I have no change!” cried John.
“Well,” said the driver, “and what then? I would rather give a man a shillin’ on a day like this than put him off with a derision like a bawbee. I’m surprised at the like of you, Mr. Baigrey!”
“My name is not Baigrey!” broke out John, in mere childish temper and distress.
“Ye told me it was yoursel’,” said the cabman.
“I know I did; and what the devil right had you to ask?” cried the unhappy one.
“O very well,” said the driver. “I know my place, if you know yours—if you know yours!” he repeated, as one who should imply grave doubts; and muttered inarticulate thunders, in which the grand old name of gentleman was taken seemingly in vain.
O to have been able to discharge this monster, whom John now perceived, with tardy clear-sightedness, to have begun betimes the festivities of Christmas! But far from any such ray of consolation visiting the lost, he stood bare of help and helpers, his portmanteau sequestered in one place, his money deserted in another and guarded by a corpse; himself, so sedulous of privacy, the cynosure of allmen’s eyes about the station; and, as if these were not enough mischances, he was now fallen in ill-blood with the beast to whom his poverty had linked him! In ill-blood, as he reflected dismally, with the witness who perhaps might hang or save him! There was no time to be lost; he durst not linger any longer in that public spot; and whether he had recourse to dignity or to conciliation, the remedy must be applied at once. Some happily surviving element of manhood moved him to the former.
“Let us have no more of this,” said he, his foot once more upon the step. “Go back to where we came from.”
He had avoided the name of any destination, for there was now quite a little band of railway folk about the cab, and he still kept an eye upon the court of justice, and laboured to avoid concentric evidence. But here again the fatal jarvey out-manœuvred him.
“Back to the Ludge?” cried he, in shrill tones of protest.
“Drive on at once!” roared John, and slammed the door behind him, so that the crazy chariot rocked and jingled.
Forth trundled the cab into the Christmas streets, the fare within plunged in the blackness of a despair that neighboured on unconsciousness, the driver on the box digesting his rebuke and his customer’s duplicity. I would not be thought to put the pair in competition; John’s case was out of all parallel. But the cabman, too, is worth the sympathy of the judicious; for he was a fellow of genuine kindliness and a high sense of personal dignity incensed by drink; and his advances had been cruelly and publicly rebuffed. As he drove, therefore, he counted his wrongs, and thirsted for sympathy and drink. Now, it chanced he had a friend, a publican in Queensferry Street, from whom, in view of the sacredness of the occasion, he thought he might extract a dram. Queensferry Street lies something off the direct road to Murrayfield. But then there is the hilly cross-road that passes by the valley of the Leith and the Dean Cemetery;and Queensferry Street is on the way to that. What was to hinder the cabman, since his horse was dumb, from choosing the cross-roads, and calling on his friend in passing? So it was decided; and the charioteer, already somewhat mollified, turned aside his horse to the right.
John, meanwhile, sat collapsed, his chin sunk upon his chest, his mind in abeyance. The smell of the cab was still faintly present to his senses, and a certain leaden chill about his feet; all else had disappeared in one vast oppression of calamity and physical faintness. It was drawing on to noon—two-and-twenty hours since he had broken bread; in the interval he had suffered tortures of sorrow and alarm, and had been partly tipsy; and though it was impossible to say he slept, yet when the cab stopped, and the cabman thrust his head into the window, his attention had to be recalled from depths of vacancy.
“If you’ll no’standme a dram,” said the driver, with a well-merited severity of tone and manner, “I daresay ye’ll have no objection to my taking one mysel’?”
“Yes—no—do what you like,” returned John; and then, as he watched his tormentor mount the stairs and enter the whisky-shop, there floated into his mind a sense as of something long ago familiar. At that he started fully awake, and stared at the shop-fronts. Yes, he knew them; but when? and how? Long since, he thought; and then, casting his eye through the front glass, which had been recently occluded by the figure of the jarvey, he beheld the tree-tops of the rookery in Randolph Crescent. He was close to home—home, where he had thought, at that hour, to be sitting in the well-remembered drawing-room in friendly converse; and, instead——!
It was his first impulse to drop into the bottom of the cab; his next, to cover his face with his hands. So he sat, while the cabman toasted the publican, and the publican toasted the cabman, and both reviewed the affairs of the nation; so he still sat, when his master condescended to return, and drive off at last downhill, along the curve ofLynedoch Place; but even so sitting, as he passed the end of his father’s street, he took one glance from between shielding fingers, and beheld a doctor’s carriage at the door.
“Well, just so,” thought he; “I’ll have killed my father! And this is Christmas Day!”
If Mr. Nicholson died, it was down this same road he must journey to the grave; and down this road, on the same errand, his wife had preceded him years before; and many other leading citizens, with the proper trappings and attendance of the end. And now, in that frosty, ill-smelling, straw-carpeted, and ragged-cushioned cab, with his breath congealing on the glasses, towards what other destination was John himself advancing?
The thought stirred his imagination, which began to manufacture many thousand pictures, bright and fleeting like the shapes in a kaleidoscope; and now he saw himself, ruddy and comfortered, sliding in the gutter; and again a little woe-begone, bored urchin tricked forth in crape and weepers, descending this same hill at the foot’s-pace of mourning coaches, his mother’s body just preceding him; and yet again, his fancy, running far in front, showed him the house at Murrayfield—now standing solitary in the low sunshine, with the sparrows hopping on the threshold and the dead man within staring at the roof, and now, with a sudden change, thronged about with white-faced, hand-uplifting neighbours, the doctor bursting through their midst and fixing his stethoscope as he went, the policeman shaking a sagacious head beside the body. It was to this he feared that he was driving; in the midst of this he saw himself arrive, heard himself stammer faint explanations, and felt the hand of the constable upon his shoulder. Heavens! how he wished he had played the manlier part; how he despised himself that he had fled that fatal neighbourhood when all was quiet, and should now be tamely travelling back when it was thronging with avengers!
Any strong degree of passion lends, even to the dullest, the forces of the imagination. And so now as he dwelton what was probably awaiting him at the end of this distressful drive—John, who saw things little, remembered them less, and could not have described them at all, beheld in his mind’s eye the garden of the Lodge, detailed as in a map; he went to and fro in it, feeling his terrors; he saw the hollies, the snowy borders, the paths where he had sought Alan, the high, conventual walls, the shut door—what! was the door shut? Ay, truly, he had shut it—shut in his money, his escape, his future life—shut it with these hands, and none could now open it! He heard the snap of the spring-lock like something bursting in his brain, and sat astonied.
And then he woke again, terror jarring through his vitals. This was no time to be idle; he must be up and doing, he must think. Once at the end of this ridiculous cruise, once at the Lodge door, there would be nothing for it but to turn the cab and trundle back again. Why, then, go so far? why add another feature of suspicion to a case already so suggestive? why not turn at once? It was easy to say, turn, but whither? He had nowhere now to go to; he could never—he saw it in letters of blood—he could never pay that cab; he was saddled with that cab for ever. O that cab! his soul yearned to be rid of it. He forgot all other cares. He must first quit himself of this ill-smelling vehicle and of the human beast that guided it—first do that; do that at least; do that at once.
And just then the cab suddenly stopped, and there was his persecutor rapping on the front glass. John let it down, and beheld the port-wine countenance flamed with intellectual triumph.
“I ken wha ye are!” cried the husky voice. “I mind ye now. Ye’re a Nucholson. I drove ye to Hermiston to a Christmas party, and ye came back on the box, and I let ye drive.”
It was a fact. John knew the man; they had been even friends. His enemy, he now remembered, was a fellow of great good-nature—endless good-nature—witha boy; why not with a man? Why not appeal to his better side? He grasped at the new hope.
“Great Scott; and so you did,” he cried, as if in a transport of delight, his voice sounding false in his own ears. “Well, if that’s so, I’ve something to say to you. I’ll just get out, I guess. Where are we, any way?”
The driver had fluttered his ticket in the eyes of the branch toll-keeper, and they were now brought to on the highest and most solitary part of the by-road. On the left, a row of field-side trees beshaded it; on the right it was bordered by naked fallows, undulating downhill to the Queensferry Road; in front, Corstorphine Hill raised its snow-bedabbled, darkling woods against the sky. John looked all about him, drinking the clear air like wine; then, his eyes returned to the cabman’s face as he sat, not ungleefully, awaiting John’s communication, with the air of one looking to be tipped.
The features of that face were hard to read, drink had so swollen them, drink had so painted them, in tints that varied from brick-red to mulberry. The small grey eyes blinked, the lips moved, with greed; greed was the ruling passion; and though there was some good-nature, some genuine kindliness, a true human touch, in the old toper, his greed was now so set afire by hope, that all other traits of character lay dormant. He sat there a monument of gluttonous desire.
John’s heart slowly fell. He had opened his lips, but he stood there and uttered nought. He sounded the well of his courage, and it was dry. He groped in his treasury of words, and it was vacant. A devil of dumbness had him by the throat; a devil of terror babbled in his ears; and suddenly, without a word uttered, with no conscious purpose formed in his will, John whipped about, tumbled over the roadside wall, and began running for his life across the fallows.
He had not gone far, he was not past the midst of the first field, when his whole brain thundered within him,“Fool! You have your watch!” The shock stopped him and he faced once more towards the cab. The driver was leaning over the wall, brandishing his whip, his face empurpled, roaring like a bull. And John saw (or thought) that he had lost the chance. No watch would pacify the man’s resentment now; he would cry for vengeance also. John would be under the eye of the police; his tale would be unfolded, his secret plumbed, his destiny would close on him at last, and for ever.
He uttered a deep sigh; and just as the cabman, taking heart of grace, was beginning at last to scale the wall, his defaulting customer fell again to running and disappeared into the farther fields.
Wherehe ran at first, John never very clearly knew; nor yet how long a time elapsed ere he found himself in the by-road near the lodge of Ravelston, propped against the wall, his lungs heaving like bellows, his legs leaden-heavy, his mind possessed by one sole desire—to lie down and be unseen. He remembered the thick coverts round the quarry-hole pond, an untrodden corner of the world where he might surely find concealment till the night should fall. Thither he passed down the lane; and when he came there, behold! he had forgotten the frost, and the pond was alive with young people skating, and the pond-side coverts were thick with lookers-on. He looked on awhile himself. There was one tall, graceful maiden, skating hand in hand with a youth, on whom she bestowed her bright eyes perhaps too patently; and it was strange with what anger John beheld her. He could have broken forth in curses; he could have stood there, like a mortified tramp, and shaken his fist and vented his gall upon her by the hour—or so he thought; and the next moment his heart bled for the girl. “Poor creature, it’s little she knows!” he sighed. “Let her enjoy herself while she can!” But was it possible, when Flora used to smile at him on the Braid ponds, she could have looked so fulsome to a sick-hearted bystander?
The thought of one quarry, in his frozen wits, suggested another; and he plodded off towards Craigleith. A wind had sprung up out of the north-west; it was cruel keen, it dried him like a fire, and racked his finger-joints. Itbrought clouds, too; pale, swift, hurrying clouds, that blotted heaven and shed gloom upon the earth. He scrambled up among the hazelled rubbish-heaps that surround the cauldron of the quarry, and lay flat upon the stones. The wind searched close along the earth, the stones were cutting and icy, the bare hazels wailed about him; and soon the air of the afternoon began to be vocal with those strange and dismal harpings that herald snow. Pain and misery turned in John’s limbs to a harrowing impatience and blind desire of change; now he would roll in his harsh lair, and when the flints abraded him was almost pleased; now he would crawl to the edge of the huge pit and look dizzily down. He saw the spiral of the descending roadway, the steep crags, the clinging bushes, the peppering of snow-wreaths, and, far down in the bottom, the diminished crane. Here, no doubt, was a way to end it. But it somehow did not take his fancy.
And suddenly he was aware that he was hungry; ay, even through the tortures of the cold, even through the frosts of despair, a gross, desperate longing after food, no matter what, no matter how, began to wake and spur him. Suppose he pawned his watch? But no, on Christmas Day—this was Christmas Day!—the pawn-shop would be closed. Suppose he went to the public-house close by at Blackhall, and offered the watch, which was worth ten pounds, in payment for a meal of bread and cheese? The incongruity was too remarkable; the good folks would either put him to the door, or only let him in to send for the police. He turned his pockets out one after another; some San Francisco tram-car checks, one cigar, no lights, the pass-key to his father’s house, a pocket-handkerchief, with just a touch of scent: no—money could be raised on none of these. There was nothing for it but to starve; and after all, what mattered it! That also was a door of exit.
He crept close among the bushes, the wind playing round him like a lash; his clothes seemed thin as paper, his joints burned, his skin curdled on his bones. He hada vision of a high-lying cattle-drive in California, and the bed of a dried stream with one muddy pool, by which the vaqueros had encamped: splendid sun over all, the big bonfire blazing, the strips of cow browning and smoking on a skewer of wood; how warm it was, how savoury the steam of scorching meat! And then again he remembered his manifold calamities, and burrowed and wallowed in the sense of his disgrace and shame. And next he was entering Frank’s restaurant in Montgomery Street, San Francisco; he had ordered a pan-stew and venison chops, of which he was immoderately fond, and as he sat waiting, Munroe, the good attendant, brought him a whisky-punch; he saw the strawberries float on the delectable cup, he heard the ice chink about the straws. And then he woke again to his detested fate, and found himself sitting, humped together, in a windy combe of quarry-refuse—darkness thick about him, thin flakes of snow lying here and there like rags of paper, and the strong shuddering of his body clashing his teeth like a hiccough.
We have seen John in nothing but the stormiest conditions; we have seen him reckless, desperate, tried beyond his moderate powers: of his daily self, cheerful, regular, not unthrifty, we have seen nothing; and it may thus be a surprise to the reader to learn that he was studiously careful of his health. This favourite pre-occupation now awoke. If he were to sit there and die of cold, there would be mighty little gained; better the police cell and the chances of a jury trial, than the miserable certainty of death at a dyke-side before the next winter’s dawn, or death a little later in the gas-lit wards of an infirmary.
He rose on aching legs, and stumbled here and there among the rubbish-heaps, still circumvented by the yawning crater of the quarry; or perhaps he only thought so, for the darkness was already dense, the snow was growing thicker, and he moved like a blind man, and with a blind man’s terrors. At last he climbed a fence, thinking to drop into the road, and found himself staggering, instead,among the iron furrows of a ploughland, endless, it seemed, as a whole county. And next he was in a wood, beating among young trees; and then he was aware of a house with many lighted windows, Christmas carriages waiting at the doors, and Christmas drivers (for Christmas has a double edge) becoming swiftly hooded with snow. From this glimpse of human cheerfulness he fled like Cain; wandered in the night, unpiloted, careless of whither he went; fell and lay, and then rose again and wandered farther; and at last, like a transformation scene, behold him in the lighted jaws of the city, staring at a lamp which had already donned the tilted night-cap of the snow. It came thickly now, a “Feeding Storm”; and while he yet stood blinking at the lamp, his feet were buried. He remembered something like it in the past, a street lamp crowned and caked upon the windward side with snow, the wind uttering its mournful hoot, himself looking on, even as now; but the cold had struck too sharply on his wits, and memory failed him as to the date and sequel of the reminiscence.
His next conscious moment was on the Dean Bridge; but whether he was John Nicholson of a bank in California Street, or some former John, a clerk in his father’s office, he had now clean forgotten. Another blank, and he was thrusting his pass-key into the door-lock of his father’s house.
Hours must have passed. Whether crouched on the cold stones or wandering in the fields among the snow, was more than he could tell; but hours had passed. The finger of the hall clock was close on twelve; a narrow peep of gas in the hall-lamp shed shadows; and the door of the back room—his father’s room—was open and emitted a warm light. At so late an hour all this was strange; the lights should have been out, the doors locked, the good folk safe in bed. He marvelled at the irregularity, leaning on the hall table; and marvelled to himself there; and thawed and grew once more hungry in the warmer air of the house.
The clock uttered its premonitory catch; in five minutesChristmas Day would be among the days of the past—Christmas!—what a Christmas! Well, there was no use waiting; he had come into that house, he scarce knew how; if they were to thrust him forth again, it had best be done at once; and he moved to the door of the back room and entered.
O, well—then he was insane, as he had long believed.
There, in his father’s room, at midnight, the fire was roaring, and the gas blazing; the papers, the sacred papers—to lay a hand on which was criminal—had all been taken off and piled along the floor; a cloth was spread, and a supper laid, upon the business table; and in his father’s chair a woman, habited like a nun, sat eating. As he appeared in the doorway, the nun rose, gave a low cry, and stood staring. She was a large woman, strong, calm, a little masculine, her features marked with courage and good sense; and as John blinked back at her, a faint resemblance dodged about his memory, as when a tune haunts us, and yet will not be recalled.
“Why, it’s John!” cried the nun.
“I daresay I’m mad,” said John, unconsciously following King Lear; “but, upon my word, I do believe you’re Flora.”
“Of course I am,” replied she.
And yet it is not Flora at all, thought John; Flora was slender, and timid, and of changing colour, and dewy-eyed; and had Flora such an Edinburgh accent? But he said none of these things, which was perhaps as well. What he said was, “Then why are you a nun?”
“Such nonsense!” said Flora. “I’m a sick-nurse; and I am here nursing your sister, with whom, between you and me, there is precious little the matter. But that is not the question. The point is: How do you come here? and are you not ashamed to show yourself?”
“Flora,” said John sepulchrally, “I haven’t eaten anything for three days. Or, at least, I don’t know what day it is; but I guess I’m starving.”
“You unhappy man!” she cried. “Here, sit down and eat my supper; and I’ll just run upstairs and see my patient; not but what I doubt she’s fast asleep, for Maria is amalade imadginaire.”
With this specimen of the French, not of Stratford-atte-Bowe, but of a finishing establishment in Moray Place, she left John alone in his father’s sanctum. He fell at once upon the food; and it is to be supposed that Flora had found her patient wakeful, and been detained with some details of nursing, for he had time to make a full end of all there was to eat, and not only to empty the teapot, but to fill it again from a kettle that was fitfully singing on his father’s fire. Then he sat torpid, and pleased, and bewildered; his misfortunes were then half forgotten; his mind considering, not without regret, this unsentimental return to his old love.
He was thus engaged when that bustling woman noiselessly re-entered.
“Have you eaten?” said she. “Then tell me all about it.”
It was a long and (as the reader knows) a pitiful story; but Flora heard it with compressed lips. She was lost in none of those questionings of human destiny that have, from time to time, arrested the flight of my own pen; for women, such as she, are no philosophers, and behold the concrete only. And women, such as she, are very hard on the imperfect man.
“Very well,” said she, when he had done; “then down upon your knees at once, and beg God’s forgiveness.”
And the great baby plumped upon his knees, and did as he was bid; and none the worse for that! But while he was heartily enough requesting forgiveness on general principles, the rational side of him distinguished, and wondered if, perhaps, the apology were not due upon the other part. And when he rose again from that becoming exercise, he first eyed the face of his old love doubtfully, and then, taking heart, uttered his protest.
“I must say, Flora,” said he, “in all this business I can see very little fault of mine.”
“If you had written home,” replied the lady, “there would have been none of it. If you had even gone to Murrayfield reasonably sober, you would never have slept there, and the worst would not have happened. Besides, the whole thing began years ago. You got into trouble, and when your father, honest man, was disappointed, you took the pet, or got afraid, and ran away from punishment. Well, you’ve had your own way of it, John, and I don’t suppose you like it.”
“I sometimes fancy I’m not much better than a fool,” sighed John.
“My dear John,” said she, “not much!”
He looked at her and his eye fell. A certain anger rose within him; here was a Flora he disowned: she was hard; she was of a set colour; a settled, mature, undecorative manner; plain of speech, plain of habit—he had come near saying, plain of face. And this changeling called herself by the same name as the many-coloured, clinging maid of yore; she of the frequent laughter, and the many sighs, and the kind, stolen glances. And to make all worse, she took the upper hand with him, which (as John well knew) was not the true relation of the sexes. He steeled his heart against this sick-nurse.
“And how do you come to be here?” he asked.
She told him how she had nursed her father in his long illness, and when he died, and she was left alone, had taken to nurse others, partly from habit, partly to be of some service in the world; partly, it might be, for amusement. “There’s no accounting for taste,” said she. And she told him how she went largely to the houses of old friends, as the need arose; and how she was thus doubly welcome, as an old friend first, and then as an experienced nurse, to whom doctors would confide the gravest case.
“And, indeed, it’s a mere farce my being here for poor Maria,” she continued; “but your father takes her ailmentsto heart, and I cannot always be refusing him. We are great friends, your father and I; he was very kind to me long ago—ten years ago.”
A strange stir came in John’s heart. All this while had he been thinking only of himself? All this while, why had he not written to Flora? In penitential tenderness, he took her hand, and, to his awe and trouble, it remained in his, compliant. A voice told him this was Flora, after all—told him so quietly, yet with a thrill of singing.
“And you never married?” said he.
“No, John; I never married,” she replied.
The hall clock striking two recalled them to the sense of time.
“And now,” said she, “you have been fed and warmed, and I have heard your story, and now it’s high time to call your brother.”
“O!” cried John, chapfallen; “do you think that absolutely necessary?”
“Ican’t keep you here; I am a stranger,” said she. “Do you want to run away again? I thought you had enough of that.”
He bowed his head under the reproof. She despised him, he reflected, as he sat once more alone; a monstrous thing for a woman to despise a man; and, strangest of all, she seemed to like him. Would his brother despise him, too? And would his brother like him?
And presently the brother appeared, under Flora’s escort; and, standing afar off beside the doorway, eyed the hero of this tale.
“So this is you?” he said at length.
“Yes, Alick, it’s me—it’s John,” replied the elder brother feebly.
“And how did you get in here?” inquired the younger.
“O, I had my pass-key,” says John.
“The deuce you had!” said Alexander. “Ah, you lived in a better world! There are no pass-keys going now.”
“Well, father was always averse to them,” sighed John. And the conversation then broke down, and the brothers looked askance at one another in silence.
“Well, and what the devil are we to do?” said Alexander. “I suppose if the authorities got wind of you, you would be taken up?”
“It depends on whether they’ve found the body or not,” returned John. “And then there’s that cabman, to be sure!”
“O, bother the body!” said Alexander. “I mean about the other thing. That’s serious.”
“Is that what my father spoke about?” asked John. “I don’t even know what it is.”
“About your robbing your bank in California, of course,” replied Alexander.
It was plain, from Flora’s face, that this was the first she had heard of it; it was plainer still, from John’s, that he was innocent.
“I!” he exclaimed. “I rob my bank! My God! Flora, this is too much; even you must allow that.”
“Meaning you didn’t?” asked Alexander.
“I never robbed a soul in all my days,” cried John: “except my father, if you call that robbery; and I brought him back the money in this room, and he wouldn’t even take it!”
“Look here, John,” said his brother; “let us have no misunderstanding upon this. MacEwen saw my father; he told him a bank you had worked for in San Francisco was wiring over the habitable globe to have you collared—that it was supposed you had nailed thousands; and it was dead certain you had nailed three hundred. So MacEwen said, and I wish you would be careful how you answer. I may tell you also, that your father paid the three hundred on the spot.”
“Three hundred?” repeated John. “Three hundred pounds, you mean? That’s fifteen hundred dollars. Why, then, it’s Kirkman!” he broke out. “Thank Heaven!I can explain all that. I gave them to Kirkman to pay for me the night before I left—fifteen hundred dollars, and a letter to the manager. What do they suppose I would steal fifteen hundred dollars for? I’m rich; I struck it rich in stocks. It’s the silliest stuff I ever heard of. All that’s needful is to cable to the manager: Kirkman has the fifteen hundred—find Kirkman. He was a fellow-clerk of mine, and a hard case; but to do him justice I didn’t think he was as hard as this.”
“And what do you say to that, Alick?” asked Flora.
“I say the cablegram shall go to-night!” cried Alexander, with energy. “Answer prepaid, too. If this can be cleared away—and upon my word I do believe it can—we shall all be able to hold up our heads again. Here, you John, you stick down the address of your bank manager. You, Flora, you can pack John into my bed, for which I have no further use to-night. As for me, I am off to the post-office, and thence to the High Street about the dead body. The police ought to know, you see, and they ought to know through John; and I can tell them some rigmarole about my brother being a man of a highly nervous organisation, and the rest of it. And then; I’ll tell you what, John—did you notice the name upon the cab?”
John gave the name of the driver, which, as I have not been able to commend the vehicle, I here suppress.
“Well,” resumed Alexander, “I’ll call round at their place before I come back, and pay your shot for you. In that way, before breakfast-time, you’ll be as good as new.”
John murmured inarticulate thanks. To see his brother thus energetic in his service moved him beyond expression; if he could not utter what he felt, he showed it legibly in his face; and Alexander read it there, and liked it the better in that dumb delivery.
“But there’s one thing,” said the latter, “cablegrams are dear; and I daresay you remember enough of the governor to guess the state of my finances.”
“The trouble is,” said John, “that all my stamps are in that beastly house.”
“All your what?” asked Alexander.
“Stamps—money,” explained John. “It’s an American expression; I’m afraid I contracted one or two.”
“I have some,” said Flora. “I have a pound-note upstairs.”
“My dear Flora,” returned Alexander, “a pound-note won’t see us very far; and besides, this is my father’s business, and I shall be very much surprised if it isn’t my father who pays for it.”
“I would not apply to him yet; I do not think that can be wise,” objected Flora.
“You have a very imperfect idea of my resources, and none at all of my effrontery,” replied Alexander. “Please observe.”
He put John from his way, chose a stout knife among the supper things, and with surprising quickness broke into his father’s drawer.
“There’s nothing easier when you come to try,” he observed, pocketing the money.
“I wish you had not done that,” said Flora. “You will never hear the last of it.”
“O, I don’t know,” returned the young man; “the governor is human, after all. And now, John, let me see your famous pass-key. Get into bed, and don’t move for any one till I come back. They won’t mind you not answering when they knock; I generally don’t myself.”
Inspite of the horrors of the day and the tea-drinking of the night, John slept the sleep of infancy. He was wakened by the maid, as it might have been ten years ago, tapping at the door. The winter sunrise was painting the east; and as the window was to the back of the house, it shone into the room with many strange colours of refracted light. Without, the houses were all cleanly roofed with snow; the garden walls were coped with it a foot in height; the greens lay glittering. Yet strange as snow had grown to John during his years upon the Bay of San Francisco, it was what he saw within that most affected him. For it was to his own room that Alexander had been promoted; there was the old paper with the device of flowers, in which a cunning fancy might yet detect the face of Skinny Jim, of the Academy, John’s former dominie; there was the old chest of drawers; there were the chairs—one, two, three—three as before. Only the carpet was new, and the litter of Alexander’s clothes and books and drawing materials, and a pencil-drawing on the wall, which (in John’s eyes) appeared a marvel of proficiency.
He was thus lying, and looking, and dreaming, hanging, as it were, between two epochs of his life, when Alexander came to the door, and made his presence known in a loud whisper. John let him in, and jumped back into the warm bed.
“Well, John,” said Alexander, “the cablegram is sent in your name, and twenty words of answer paid. I havebeen to the cab office and paid your cab, even saw the old gentleman himself, and properly apologised. He was mighty placable, and indicated his belief you had been drinking. Then I knocked up old MacEwen out of bed, and explained affairs to him as he sat and shivered in a dressing-gown. And before that I had been to the High Street, where they have heard nothing of your dead body, so that I incline to the idea that you dreamed it.”
“Catch me!” said John.
“Well, the police never do know anything,” assented Alexander; “and at any rate, they have despatched a man to inquire and to recover your trousers and your money, so that really your bill is now fairly clean; and I see but one lion in your path—the governor.”
“I’ll be turned out again, you’ll see,” said John dismally.
“I don’t imagine so,” returned the other; “not if you do what Flora and I have arranged; and your business now is to dress, and lose no time about it. Is your watch right? Well, you have a quarter of an hour. By five minutes before the half-hour you must be at table, in your old seat, under Uncle Duthie’s picture. Flora will be there to keep you countenance; and we shall see what we shall see.”
“Wouldn’t it be wiser for me to stay in bed?” said John.
“If you mean to manage your own concerns, you can do precisely what you like,” replied Alexander; “but if you are not in your place five minutes before the half-hour I wash my hands of you, for one.”
And thereupon he departed. He had spoken warmly, but the truth is, his heart was somewhat troubled. And as he hung over the banisters, watching for his father to appear, he had hard ado to keep himself braced for the encounter that must follow.
“If he takes it well, I shall be lucky,” he reflected. “If he takes it ill, why, it’ll be a herring across John’s tracks, and perhaps all for the best. He’s a confounded muff, this brother of mine, but he seems a decent soul.”
At that stage a door opened below with a certain emphasis, and Mr. Nicholson was seen solemnly to descend the stairs, and pass into his own apartment. Alexander followed, quaking inwardly, but with a steady face. He knocked, was bidden to enter, and found his father standing in front of the forced drawer, to which he pointed as he spoke.
“This is a most extraordinary thing,” said he; “I have been robbed!”
“I was afraid you would notice it,” observed his son; “it made such a beastly hash of the table.”
“You were afraid I would notice it?” repeated Mr. Nicholson. “And, pray, what may that mean?”
“That I was the thief, sir,” returned Alexander. “I took all the money in case the servants should get hold of it; and here is the change, and a note of my expenditure. You were gone to bed, you see, and I did not feel at liberty to knock you up; but I think when you have heard the circumstances you will do me justice. The fact is, I have reason to believe there has been some dreadful error about my brother John; the sooner it could be cleared up the better for all parties; it was a piece of business, sir—and so I took it, and decided, on my own responsibility, to send a telegram to San Francisco. Thanks to my quickness, we may hear to-night. There appears to be no doubt, sir, that John has been abominably used.”
“When did this take place?” asked the father.
“Last night, sir, after you were asleep,” was the reply.
“It’s most extraordinary,” said Mr. Nicholson. “Do you mean to say you have been out all night?”
“All night, as you say, sir. I have been to the telegraph and the police office, and Mr. MacEwen’s. O, I had my hands full,” said Alexander.
“Very irregular,” said the father. “You think of no one but yourself.”
“I do not see that I have much to gain in bringing back my elder brother,” returned Alexander shrewdly.
The answer pleased the old man; he smiled. “Well, well, I will go into this after breakfast,” said he.
“I’m sorry about the table,” said the son.
“The table is a small matter; I think nothing of that,” said the father.
“It’s another example,” continued the son, “of the awkwardness of a man having no money of his own. If I had a proper allowance, like other fellows of my age, this would have been quite unnecessary.”
“A proper allowance!” repeated his father, in tones of blighting sarcasm, for the expression was not new to him. “I have never grudged you money for any proper purpose.”
“No doubt, no doubt,” said Alexander, “but then you see you aren’t always on the spot to have the thing explained to you. Last night, for instance—”
“You could have wakened me last night,” interrupted his father.
“Was it not some similar affair that first got John into a mess?” asked the son, skilfully evading the point.
But the father was not less adroit. “And pray, sir, how did you come and go out of the house?” he asked.
“I forgot to lock the door, it seems,” replied Alexander.
“I have had cause to complain of that too often,” said Mr. Nicholson. “But still I do not understand. Did you keep the servants up?”
“I propose to go into all that at length after breakfast,” returned Alexander. “There is the half-hour going; we must not keep Miss Mackenzie waiting.”
And, greatly daring, he opened the door.
Even Alexander, who, it must have been perceived, was on terms of comparative freedom with his parent—even Alexander had never before dared to cut short an interview in this high-handed fashion. But the truth is, the very mass of his son’s delinquencies daunted the old gentleman. He was like the man with the cart of apples—this was beyond him! That Alexander should have spoiledhis table, taken his money, stayed out all night, and then coolly acknowledged all, was something undreamed of in the Nicholsonian philosophy, and transcended comment. The return of the change, which the old gentleman still carried in his hand, had been a feature of imposing impudence; it had dealt him a staggering blow. Then there was the reference to John’s original flight—a subject which he always kept resolutely curtained in his own mind; for he was a man who loved to have made no mistakes, and, when he feared he might have made one, kept the papers sealed. In view of all these surprises and reminders, and of his son’s composed and masterful demeanour, there began to creep on Mr. Nicholson a sickly misgiving. He seemed beyond his depth; if he did or said anything, he might come to regret it. The young man, besides, as he had pointed out himself, was playing a generous part. And if wrong had been done—and done to one who was after, and in spite of all, a Nicholson—it should certainly be righted.