Part 11

'You'd be astonished how long they keep their heat, too,' Herries said to Alison. 'We'll put one in your muff, and you'll see how 'twill keep your hands warm all the way home.' And he popped the biggest into Alison's muff, and was very 'jokey' with Isabella, and Isabella with him, and so the time went very pleasantly. But, alas! as the end drew near, and Danny heard the horses' feet upon the street, and knew he was to be left behind, he began to cry, not with the robust roar of healthy childhood, but with silent tears, that overflowed his piteous dark eyes, and wet his small pale face. Alison gathered him in her arms, and cuddled him against her shoulder. She spoke to him of the coming summer--of the time when he would be well again and able to run about, and Willy should come down and play with him on the sands. And Danny--who would never see another summer, or run about again, or play with his little brother more--looked up in her kind face, and was comforted.

The afternoon had settled to a piercing cold, as they drove home. For a mile, the horses, maddened with the frost, and fresh from their long rest, ran away, and the coach swayed from side to side, Willy shrieking with delight. Alison felt a strange excitement in the air; the evening was so lovely--earth and sky and sea wore those strange, gem-like tints which are part of the magic accompaniment of a great frost. There rose, to their left, out of the ruddy haze--the craggy mass of Arthur's Seat; and tower and crown, and citadel and spire rose, one by one, and the great rock-built city wore all its classic air--a smoky fane, spread to the cold gods of the north. Herries was very silent; in the dark of the coach, silhouetted against the window, Alison could see the fine, cold profile, the severe, set mouth. She was very silent too, and presently Willy fell asleep, and lay against her knee in a tired heap.

When they got out at the Grassmarket it was in the gloaming, and Herries said he would see his charges to their door. A slip of the new moon swam in the limpid sky; every now and then she looked down at them between the high houses. Alison was turning over in her mind the pretty speech that she must make to Mr. Herries for this pleasant day. Ah, how to say enough, and not too much! The very thought of it made her heart beat--with sheer nervousness, was it? Or was it that Herries's extreme silence was burdened with a meaning which made itself felt, in the strange way of such things?

When they got to the General's Entry, Willy clattered up the stair. The lamp flared, and in its doubtful light Herries stood waiting. And then, because, perhaps, being of a masterful mind, he meant to wait no longer for what he wanted; or just because what he wanted was so near, so sweet, so terribly desirable,--his arm crept to Alison's waist, and he kissed her, and the ice of his life seemed broken, all the sweet springs of summer to gush in his heart.

'Ally, Ally,' he whispered--and why his first words were jealous ones he could not have told you--'Ally, tell me, did a man ever kiss you before?'

'Never in all my life!' said Alison, staring straight out before her into the dark, with wonder-struck eyes. And lo! that which had been a reproach at The Mains became the crowning glory of her life, and at that Pygmalion-like touch of a lover's lips, the soul of Alison awoke to passion, as the marble awoke to life.

But--such is the relentlessness of the prose of life--Jean must choose this interesting moment in which to open the door above them and let a light down the shaft of the stair. The pair started asunder, Herries stammered good-night, and Alison walked up the dirty steps of that Edinburgh common stair as though they were the rungs of a golden ladder leading straight to heaven.

*CHAPTER XXVI.*

It might generally be supposed that one great emotion of the mastering kind possesses the soul to the temporary exclusion of all others. But this is not the case; for it is, rather, when the soul is awake--quivering to the touch of some novel experience--that its sensitiveness to new impressions is the greatest, and its capacity for seeing all things and understanding all things is at the fullest stretch. Thus, when Alison walked into Nancy's room that night, full of her own bliss, her heart gave only one bounding throb the more when she found a stranger there, and realised that at last she beheld the longed-for visitor, stood in the presence of genius, and touched the hand of Robert Burns.

The familiar room wore its cosiest and most seductive aspect--the curtains drawn, and fire- and candle-light shining on the wall. The figure, which, at Nancy's motion, rose to meet Alison, seemed to her almost colossal; but only so, because her mind's-eye was filled with the slenderer proportions of a very different figure. The man was indeed of peasant build, of a goodly height, but heavy and thick-set, dressed decently and yeoman-wise, 'like a farmer to dine with the laird.' As he bent towards her the full-blooded, warm-hued, powerful face, she became conscious of his eyes, black as night, with their fringe of shadow-casting lashes--commanding and compelling eyes, almost surcharged with brilliance. Nancy was speaking, lightly, gracefully.

'I told you of my song-bird,' said she to the poet; 'here she is. She'll warble your lays with the very "wood-note wild" you are always asking for. Ally, love, welcome home! We were waiting for you. Run, child, and take off your things, and come and sing. Must she not, Sylvander?'

The poet bowed. It could not be said that his gestures were clumsy, for the man had ever a natural dignity; but they had the air of indifferently controlled strength, which spoke the peasant struggling with the conventions of the parlour. His great, black glance covered Alison; half-wondering and half-shrinking, she felt it search her.

'If Miss Graham,' he said, with a low bow, 'will honour me with a song, she will make a poor poet the richer. I find no inspiration in the world like the lilt of a bonny voice in a bonny tune.'

Alison smiled to herself as she went to put off her hood and pelisse and smooth her curls. The deep, flattering voice rang oddly in her ears, for they were full of the curt speech and clear, incisive utterance of her lover--who was certainly no poet.

In her absence, the Bard leaned against the mantel-piece and glowered down with his dark look upon his hostess. She--flushed, radiant, passionate, fluttered like a bird in the big hand of the fowler, but a willing bird.

'Are all our interviews, madam,' began the Bard rather moodily, 'to be held in the presence of a third person? Are Clarinda and Sylvander never to be alone?'

'Nay, but our third person--such a sweet, interesting girl,' said Nancy, persuasively. 'The companion of my dreary solitude--think of it! 'Twill not be always possible to dispense with her society,' she added, pensively, 'nor--nor desirable, perhaps.'

A warm look shot from the poet's eye.

'Has _she_ no kindred soul compelling her society when we wish mutually to enjoy each other's?' demanded he, harping on the unexpected intruder.

'Nay, never a one!' said Nancy, laughing archly. 'And 'tis a girl I promised to find a swain for, too. Can Sylvander's romantic ingenuity not help me here?'

'Sylvander has the kettle on the other hob, I'm thinking!' said the poet with a short, meaning laugh. His manner varied from the rather stilted politeness into which he had schooled it, sometimes to a racy reversion to his native ways of speech and gesture, sometimes, when an opening offered, to an uncontrollable and not always inoffensive familiarity. Sundry mistakes in such matters had cost him more than one friendship in the feminine great world--a cruel but perfectly inevitable injustice. Here, however, and with his present hostess, he was but too little likely to offend. Nancy was constitutionally lenient to the stronger sex in its warm moments. She had that curious insensitiveness to encroachment--that lack of resentment to the taking of small liberties--which may be sometimes seen in perfectly-refined and gently-nurtured women. It did not offend her now, for instance, that the poet--seen only for the second time in her life--should bend so closely over her, covering her with ardent, covetous eyes ... and then abruptly straighten himself as Alison came in.

'Come along, child,' she cried, 'and sing! No, not with the harp--alone.' She blew out two candles that were guttering low, so that the room was in firelight only. Alison sat down, and with her hands folded in her lap and her grave eyes fixed upon the fire, sang--sang, I think, as she had never sung before, because, at last, there had come to her a full understanding of the song. She chose one or two of the simpler and older ballads, love-songs of a peasant people long ago.

Then might one who watched have seen a singular transfiguration come over the poet's face. The heavy sensuality of its lines seemed to melt away, and leave in its place a sort of splendid, weighty thoughtfulness. Leaning his elbow on his knee, his chin upon his clenched hand, the whole soul of the man seemed once more concentrated in his eyes, but they were no longer the eyes of the satyr, but of the poet; and they were looking at Alison, not as at the woman, but as at the singer, whose sweet singing roused inspiration at its source. Even now his lips moved, for the lyrical impulse stirred within him, and the thronging words and the tingling lines leapt into unison in his throbbing brain. You could see the massive features quiver, the passionate veins upon the temples swell, the eye blaze beneath the furrowed brow. Nancy watched and worshipped him as a fanatic before a shrine, and even literal Alison, as she felt herself wrapt in that consuming presence, knew herself, with a singular uplifting of the spirit, to be, for the moment, the privileged hand-maid of genius. When the last sounds died away, the man would move, would slap his giant thigh, with something like a shout of pure delight, and call for more, broad as the peasant that he was, and with the passion and insistence of a boy. In these fine, natural moments, Alison liked him well, and when he fell to discussing the ballad or the air--thoughtful, intelligent, shrewd--she would like him even better, and feel that even Herries might approve her liking. Ah! had this been all, and these little _symposia_ that were to take place so often in the cosy little room, been all as innocent as they seemed, what a fitting, what a grand impression of Scotland's poet would Alison have carried away with her! But, alas! 'Sylvander' all too soon would don the cap and bells, and then Alison would wonder, with a shudder, how Nancy could bear to have him sit so close, and bend so near to hers that changed face, with the bold eyes and sensual lips. Intellectual attraction--fascination even--the man had for the girl, must have had, indeed, for all who came under the sway of his tremendous personality and his genius, but it warred in her, sometimes, with a physical repulsion, so strong that she could scarcely conceal it.

This first evening, Willy called to her from his bed, for the story she was in the habit of telling him before he went to sleep. So 'Sylvander' and 'Clarinda' snatched a few precious moments of communion alone.

'Well,' Nancy said, 'was not that a fit song for a poet's ear? Has not the child the sweetest voice?'

'Ay,' said the poet, stretching great arms above his head, his dark eyes glowing, and his bronzed cheek flushed. 'Ay, a sweet voice! My heart leaps, and my blood sallies at its sweetness. I am a slave to such sounds. But miss will not sing often for the poor bard. I can see,' he added in a different tone, ''tis a fine lady--not a congenial, not a sympathetic soul....'

'What? Poor Ally?' said Nancy, in unfeigned surprise. 'Why, 'tis the simplest, the most unquestioning child! Sure, there's no thought of criticism in her heart towards anyone.' The poet shrugged his shoulders incredulously. He had the quick, morbid sensitiveness of the poet tribe, and already he had noted the almost intangible shrinking of Alison from his person--the hardly perceptible drawing of herself up when he pressed too near, or spoke gallantly. He put it down to the feeling of class, which he was always so suspiciously ready to detect and to resent--the shrinking of a proud miss from the peasant.

'You see, Sylvander,' Nancy went on, 'the child may be of such great service in our friendship. Her very presence is a pretext for the visits of a certain bard. Young, fair, a songstress, might not she--rather than poor Clarinda's fading charms--be thought to constitute his attraction?'

'Provided the deception hurts no one,' said the Bard rather uneasily. He had that sense of fairness which is too exclusively, it is to be feared, a masculine quality. An untethered rover in the fields of love, he never yet willingly poached, or spoiled another's sport. 'I would not hurt miss with the world,' he added.

'Take care you do not the rather hurt Clarinda with the world!' cried Nancy, shaking an admonitory finger. Passion and prudence alternately swayed the little woman at this time; her warm temperament and growing passion drove her within the sphere of danger; her love of the world and its countenance, a terror of losing caste, as a young and pretty woman in a delicate situation, held her back.

Now, as the poet rose to depart, she loaded him with cautions as to his future coming and going. She begged of him not to employ the town's messengers: they were so shifty, and getting to know her house too well; not to come, if he could avoid it, in a chair--chairs were so unusual in that poor part of the town that they caused remark; not to trouble Jean too often at the door: 'twere better he should have the key.

'See how I honour, how I trust, my Sylvander!' she said, softly. The poet pocketed the key, with, it must be admitted, a rollicking eye for so romantic a personage. He did his best, however, to look only impassioned, and not also entertained. And such apt deceivers are men, that he perfectly succeeded.

When he was gone, Alison and Nancy sat a while together by the fire, but they had singularly little to say to each other. Nancy asked a few evidently forced questions about her boy, and the expedition to Prestonpans; but her thoughts were elsewhere, and she was silent and restless.

'Thank Heaven!' she exclaimed suddenly, 'now Danny's away, Herries will not be poking his solemn face in so often as of late. 'Twould be most consumedly awkward if he did.'

And then Alison realised, with a very strange feeling of aloofness from her friend, and a peculiar sense of the unnaturalness of the situation, that she could never--no, not imaginably ever, she thought--speak to Nancy of her love, and of her lover, Herries!

So that wondrous day ended for Alison, and she was alone at last, with no tangible memento of it, saving, indeed, a large cold potato in her muff. A certain intangible memento, it is true, burned upon her cheek, so that she was glad to bury it in the cool sheets. One never knows how long it may be since a reader was in love, and so it were better, perhaps, not to tell how a silly girl, that night, went to bed with a cold potato under her pillow. It might be so very long ago--that silly season with the reader--that he may well have forgotten that, though the sense of humour is a mighty great thing, there is a time with us all when it is nought.

*CHAPTER XXVII.*

Ordinary mortals, from the schoolboy upward, are familiar with the disagreeableness of what may be called the Monday mornings of life--those after-holiday mornings which come as a cold _douche_ after a pleasant outing. Herries tasted the full amenities of this experience on first buckling to his work after the excursion to Prestonpans. On Sunday--a _dies non_ in the Edinburgh of those days, when most decent persons went to church and stayed there--nothing could be done. On Monday morning he descended to his office in his grimmest business mood, very unlike a young man who had kissed a girl under the lantern in the General's Entry, late on Saturday evening. Indeed, anyone less like kissing, or being kissed, never was seen.

He found a disagreeable accumulation of business; and a certain fact that had lately, from time to time, been hinting its existence--the fact, namely, that his partner's working capacities were on the wane--was this morning, for the first time, fully borne in upon his mind. In regard to the rather important affairs of a client, there was confusion, and, in respect to the preparation of certain deeds and papers, delay; neither, a few weeks ago, would have been possible, under Creighton's inexorable _regime_. Herries felt that probably he must shortly face--of all things the most worrying to a business-man, whose affairs have long run in a smooth, appointed groove--a change of partnership. It was the more difficult as Creighton gave no hint of his retirement, and the idea that such a hint might have to originate with his partner, was exceedingly repugnant to the younger man. Herries was aware that his associate's health was very delicate, but like all those in daily contact with a failing man, he had no idea how great and how rapid was the decline. It certainly never struck him that Creighton omitted to speak of his retirement from business, simply because he believed the last retirement of all to be imminent, and death about to set his partner free.

When Herries had made some headway with his morning's work, lost his temper with his clerk, and otherwise expressed his consciousness of the untowardness of things in general, he made the pleasing discovery, that a moral earthquake was heaving in the domestic department of his house. His room was ill-swept, his fire ill-tended; he summoned Lizzie, who appeared in even more than her usual condition of dishevelment, and telling her to send Mysie with some wood, was met with the baffling information: 'There's nae Mysie here!' delivered with a war-like snort.

'No Mysie!' exclaimed Herries. 'Why, what's come to the girl?'

'There's that come to her,' said Lizzie, succinctly, 'that it ill becomes a decent body to hae the tellin' o'....'

'What!' said Herries, repressing a strong inclination to laugh. 'Has the poor wench gone wrong?'

The ferocity of Lizzie's expression was answer enough.

'So homely looks are no safeguard after all, Lizzie?' said Herries, when he had been enlightened. 'And all your trouble in choosing a discreet helpmate was thrown away!' He could not help tormenting his dependent, whose temper afforded him amusement at times, as well as inconvenience. 'How and when did you get rid of the girl?' he enquired.

'Rid o' her--the dirty besom!' said Lizzie, reverting to the idiom of the fray. 'I put her to the door, and to the street--and her skirling like a scraggit hen! I'se warrant ye, I got rid o' her!'

'Well, I hope you gave her her wages up to date,' said Herries, turning away, 'and did not put the poor wretch penniless on the pavement, in her condition, and in this weather.'

'Oo, she had siller, I'm thinking,' said the old woman, with a sly look; 'there was a croon i' the pocket o' her--and ane no' honestly come by, neither.'

'Bless me!' said Herries, 'you paint your relative very black, Lizzie! Did she steal the crown?'

'Na,' said Lizzie, with unpleasant meaning in her tone; she had a tongue that would always hurt someone, if it could,--'she got given the croon right enough! 'Twas frae that braw leddy i' the red coat ye had to her tea here; she wad hae Mysie haud her tongue aboot some cantrip o' her ane, up the toon there, leaving a letter, or sic-like trash; but Mysie, ye ken, was simple, and aye blabbed everything she saw. O, they're a' the same, gentle and simple,' added Lizzie, who hated her own sex with inexplicable malice.

'You may go,' said Herries, curtly. He felt as though he had got a slap across the face--and from a dirty hand.

Pressure of work at first allowed him no time for unprofitable musing. He had to go down to his partner's room on business. The office, as usual, was heated to suffocation, and he found Creighton--a most singular state of things--half asleep, or rather in a condition of a sort of semi-torpor, crouching over the fire. He, however, roused himself, and attended to the business in hand with almost his usual perspicacity. But Herries perceived that his energy was but a spurt; it flagged almost instantly.

'You don't look well, sir,' he said to the elder man.

'I am not well, Herries,' Creighton answered heavily, but he said no more, for his breath seemed to catch.

'I must beg of you to excuse my further attendance to-day,' he gasped out. 'I must--I must go out into the air. I burn--my chest seems weighted. The fresh air would relieve me.'

'It is very cold, sir,' said Herries, alarmed by his partner's symptoms. 'Let me come with you.'

'Will you?' said Creighton, wistfully. Herries helped the old man--he seemed suddenly to have become a very old man--into his great-coat. He hardly believed him fit to walk, but the going out seemed to relieve him, as he expected. He drew one or two deep breaths of the icy air, and then walked on, though with a feeble step.

'Take my arm,' said Herries, kindly. 'We'll have a turn in the sun, below the castle.'

They proceeded for some way in silence. One subject tormented Herries's thoughts; he was impelled--unlike himself, somehow--to give it utterance.

'I was right, and you wrong, about a trifle, the other night, Creighton,' he said. 'A young lady of our acquaintance, who refused my escort up the town, did so because she had something to hide.'

'Who told you?' asked Creighton, sharply.

'Lizzie,' said Herries. 'The lass Mysie told tales when she got home. She was heavily fee'd to hold her tongue about some letter secretly left.'

'And you tell me,' exclaimed Creighton, with unexpected energy, 'that you listen to the gossip of servants on such a subject! Fie, for shame, sir! Besides, are you the Grand Turk, or a Catholic Inquisitor, that a girl may not leave a letter on a friend? Just as likely it was not her own letter, but your cousin's; and as to the feeing, why, 'twas the New Year time, and she would have to fee the lass for her trouble.'

'A crown is a heavy fee from a girl's slender purse to a scullion,' said Herries, moodily. 'I have an inkling,' he went on, frowning, 'where the letter was left--St. James's Square, I dare be sworn! We know who lodges there, and the women can no more keep off him than flies from honey.'

'Bless me!' said Creighton. 'Are you blaming our poor Rob? Nay, sir, but what a strange, far-fetched idea. I had hardly realised the Bard was known to your cousin, though I think you told me they met some weeks ago.'

'By this time, I daresay, he frequents my cousin's house,' said Herries, quietly, 'for that's his way in such matters. A scoundrel in manners,' went on the young lawyer, angrily; 'the seducer of women--I know him! I'd sooner trust the lamb with the wolf, than a young, inexperienced girl with such a man. The glamour of his genius hides the corruption of his mind. The thought of that danger is sickening.'

'Wheesht, wheest!' said Creighton. 'I don't gainsay that he is warm--too warm, poor Rob! But believe me, sir, 'tis not the young and noble and innocent--like our fair friend who shall be nameless--that such a man seeks. 'Tis the more experienced women--ripe for dalliance--versed in such ardours--'