Part 16

She only looked at them a moment, just till the clock struck. Then they moved with a start, and she also moved forward, until she too stood in the circle of light. Petrified, the lovers saw her both at once,--staring, chapfallen, as though they beheld a spirit: only a girl, indeed, with bare feet, and in her nightgown, sleep still in her wide eyes and curls scattered on her shoulders, but hedged about with the immutable dignity of innocence, and strong with the strength of right. She walked straight up to Nancy, and with a little jerk of effort took her into her own arms from the man's embrace, facing him boldly.

'It is too late for visitors here, sir,' she said simply. 'Mrs. Maclehose would have you go.'

The poet's arms dropped to his side and his jaw fell. His sun-browned face had become quite pale, and the words which stammered on his lips would not get themselves spoken. When he moved it was to fumble for his hat. Then he made for the door, without a look or word for those he left; and it might be said that he slunk, then and there, from the room and from the house.

Nancy had slipped from Alison's arms and lay on the floor in a little huddled heap, moaning. Alison tried to raise her, but she would not rise.

'Come, Nancy, come to bed,' whispered the girl. 'You are cold--you are shaking.' She lifted her, and then Nancy stood up, staring round her with miserable, unseeing eyes--deadly pale, and utterly dishevelled.

'I--I slipped,' she said, in a curious dazed way. 'I--slipped--and nearly fell, Ally.'

'Here's my hand,' said Alison. And then, half leading and half carrying her, the girl took the wretched little woman to her bed.

*CHAPTER XXXVIII.*

Alison watched all night long beside her friend. Nancy never let go her hand, but lay holding it, at first in a kind of wretched stupor, staring straight before her, with dry, miserable eyes; then in a sort of palsy of convulsive shivering, and at last in a fit of hysterical weeping, so violent that it seemed to tear her little frame to pieces. Alison soothed and comforted her as best she could, but at first neither peace nor comfort came. The girl's own thoughts were full of bewilderment. Here, in truth, was love--a creature shaken by it through all the innermost places of her being. Alison, too, loved--but then, how differently! Was it the same passion--this, that destroyed her friend, and that which raised her own soul to heights never dreamed of before she had known Herries? Presently Nancy fell into the light doze of sheer exhaustion, and Alison was able to go and dress herself.

But her troubles were by no means over, for Nancy awoke to a plight most piteous--a mental condition almost impossible to cope with. Like one, who, saved from some horrible fate by accident or misadventure, is haunted by phantasmal death in every form, so Nancy, with the tremendous recoil of every natural womanly feeling, beheld herself, again and yet again, on the verge of the great and terrible abyss from which she had been so narrowly and so barely saved. Her mind clung now, with the painful obstinacy and insistence of hysteria, to every symbol and outward sign of safety. Could these stumbling steps of hers be hid? Could she resume, before the men and women of her world, the steady gait of blameless womanhood? With words that harrowed Alison's very soul, she protested her actual innocence, while she bemoaned the folly that had made her risk her reputation. Oh, she had been mad--blind--headstrong! She saw it all now.

'All my life, Ally,' she said, her sweet voice roughened with long crying--'all my life I've been guided by the impulse of the moment. My passion has done what it will with me, and now it has undone me utterly.' Then she fell to harping on the theme of secrecy. Was there anyone who would betray her? How much did Jean know, and did she gossip? And Alison--Alison, who knew all--oh, was she sure of herself? Would she never--never by word, or look, or sign--betray her friend?

'Will you swear to me, Ally, that you'll never tell?' cried Nancy, raising herself in bed. 'I'd be easier if you'd swear upon the Bible never to betray me!'

'Nay,' said Alison, proudly, 'I'll not swear. Have I ever lied to you that you should ask an oath? But I'll promise you, Nancy, by all you've been to me, and done for me, that no word of mine shall ever tell your secret to any human being.' Nancy sank back among her pillows with a sigh of relief.

'Then I'm safe,' she said, 'for _he_ will never betray me; to kiss and tell is not his nature. He is all the noblest generosity! Don't think my love is dead, Ally,' she added in something of her old tones. 'It lives, and it will live, purified. I'll tear the earthly part of it from my heart, and live in hopes that we may meet in heaven!' Soothed by this interesting and sanguine reflection, Nancy grew calmer. She took a little of her sleeping medicine, and Alison was just beginning to look forward to an hour of peace, when she awoke with a scream. 'Oh, God!' she cried aloud, 'my key!'

'Hush, Nancy; Jean will hear you,' said Alison, patiently. 'What key?'

'My key,' reiterated Nancy, working herself up into a passion of terror; 'my house key. Oh! fool that I was! I gave it to him in all innocence: it was before your own eyes, Alison, and only to save Jean when she was throng. It has an ivory label to it, with my name and the street's name, and if it is found with him I am undone--undone!' She twined her fingers in her hair and would have torn it but that Alison held her hands. Alison herself looked blank enough; the matter of the key struck her as a bad business, incriminating evidence enough in the hands of such a man as Burns--careless, if he was not malicious, and, like all men, leaving things about. 'Ally, as you love me, you must go and get it from him!' said Nancy; 'I'll not trust the matter upon paper. I must have a messenger, and that messenger must be you.'

'Nay, but that's too much!' cried Alison, turning white.

'Too much?' said Nancy, piteously. 'Too much to save your friend whom you have promised to save? Oh, Ally, pity me--pity me--and go!' She put up her trembling arms and caught Alison about the neck, clinging to her.

'If I go,' said poor Alison, desperately, 'will you promise me one thing, Nancy--never, never to send me on another message to this man?'

'Never! I swear!' cried Nancy. 'Oh, Ally, I've been wrong to do it so often, most hideously selfish and wrong so to have used your good-nature. But you'll forgive me, for I knew not what I did!'

Alison met the inevitable with a kind of cold, white calm. Her very flesh shrank from the thought of meeting Burns, of being near him and breathing the same air. Now she must not only go to his house, but in all probability enter it, doing that which, to anyone not acquainted with the intricacies of the affair and her own obscure part in it, was, on the face of it, open to the gravest misconstruction. Should Herries know of it--what then? But a kind of despair had come to Alison on this point. She must do what she had to do; it was all a ghastly mistake, a growing and intolerable injustice, but she must blunder on with it now. She was the same Alison, and in the same mood, who had desperately promised in Jacky's twilight nursery, weeks ago, to marry Mr. Cheape because duty drove her to it, and she saw no other way.

It was agreed that she should wait till nearly dusk before setting out, and it was, perhaps, five or six o'clock before she left the house. She hurried through the familiar streets, choosing the obscurer ones, and keeping in the shadow--haunted by a sense of the guilt which was not hers. She stood at last before the odiously familiar door in St. James's Square, and knocked. It was opened to her by Nicol, and Alison's flesh crept, for she loathed the man, and feared him now--she knew not why.

'Is Mr. Burns within?' she asked in a low voice. Nicol looked her up and down with an indescribable insolence.

'No, mistress,' he said, 'he's not.'

'Will he be in soon?' Alison forced herself to ask.

'Are you that anxious to see him?' said Nicol, with a leer. Alison drew herself up, with a passionate scorn, though she trembled in every limb.

'I have important business with Mr. Burns,' she faltered, 'and desire an interview.'

'Ay, oh, ay, I understand!' said Nicol. 'Well, mistress, come in and wait. Rob's door is never closed to bonny lasses.' He held the door wide. Behind his uncouth figure opened a vista of dingy passage, ending in a stair. Alison hesitated, half drew back; to cross that threshold was horrible to her; it seemed to put her in the power of men--of bad men. She held her hand to her heart--it fluttered so--and cast a longing look down the empty street. Oh, for some help! But no help came.

'If there is some room where I could wait--alone' ... she began, with an unlucky inflection on the last word, which Nicol's ear caught, and bitterly resented.

'Oh, ay, there's a room where you can be private,' answered Nicol, with suspicious blandness. 'Come up the stair.' He led the way, and Alison followed in the close, malodorous darkness.

Burns occupied two rooms on the first floor of the house, a parlour and sleeping-closet communicating. It was into the former of these that Nicol ushered Alison--a disorderly and ill-kept room, with a bottle and glasses on the table, and articles of a man's wearing apparel strewn about upon the chairs and floor.

''Tis no room for a fine miss like you,' said Nicol, with dangerous politeness. 'I'll take it upon myself to usher you into our sanctum sanctorum--'tis more genteel.'

'But if this is the parlour,' said Alison, looking round her nervously, and perhaps beginning a little to lose her head, 'if this is the parlour, had I not better remain here?'

'No, no,' said Nicol, speciously, 'we have the other--much more private. Here anyone may come at any moment, you see, and if your business is private--' It was a touch of devilish cunning, for terror seized Alison at the thought of an intrusion.

'If, then, you think it wiser--' she said, looking about her with startled eyes.

'Ay, come away--much wiser'--said Nicol. 'See here!' He held open the door of the inner room--its only entrance--and Alison walked in. The moment her feet were over the threshold, Nicol slammed-to the door upon her, and locked it with a loud report.

'There, my bonny bird!' he called, his grinning mouth to the panel; 'we've got you safe and sound! Are ye "alone" enough in there for your taste? 'Od, it's there you'll bide till Rob comes hame and lets ye out!' He exploded in a fit of laughter; here was a piece of horse-play after his own heart.

Stunned and stupid, Alison had tottered a few steps into the inner room. A bed in the corner, unmade since the morning, showed that it was the poet's sleeping chamber. And she was trapped beyond all possibility of escape.

*CHAPTER 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.