Part 17

'Your host is drunk,' he said to Alison, almost cavalierly. He had become icily cool, and the crisp tones of his business manner came to him, as though he stood in his own orderly office with a client in front of him. 'I cannot leave you here, you understand,' he continued, addressing her; 'you are in my relative's care, and I am her representative. You must leave this house--for the present, at least--and leave it with me.' He went to the door, and opened it, with a gesture that seemed to command rather than to solicit her exit. No one interfered, not even Nicol moved or spoke. With bowed head, Alison walked slowly from the room. And as she did so, the swaying figure of Burns, supine, fell prostrate on the table in a drunken sleep.

Out of doors it was raining, pouring with rain out of the black night sky. Neither Alison nor her companion could shelter themselves, and the gusty wind blew in their bent faces as they struggled along. A link-boy's torch flashed at the corner of the square, and at the end of Princes Street there was a pack of chairmen sheltering under a wall, for it was an Assembly night.

'I will see you under shelter and in safety,' said Herries, speaking for the first time. 'But after that I can never willingly see your face again. Do you understand?' He had to raise his voice against the wind and the hiss and patter of the rain.

'I understand,' said Alison; 'I expected nothing else,' she added proudly. Yet the pride was for him, not herself. _He_ take that which was smirched and spoiled? Not a fair one, but the fairest of all, must be his, and how could she ever be fairest again--even though Herries should know all--stained to the soul as she felt, after those destroying, those damning hours in the squalid chamber of a libertine? It would be a relief, she thought, to part. Oh, let him go! let him go!

He called a chair and handed her into it, punctiliously instructing and paying the chairman. How it stabbed Alison that he should do this now. How often, in the happy dealings of a man with a girlish guest, he had paid such little sums on her behalf. But all that was over and done with. And in the pelting rain, and in the dark, wordless they parted.

Alison felt in her pocket for Nancy's key. At least she had that and her friend should be safe. She had seen it among a lot of untidy litter on a table in her prison, and had had the sense and courage to take it. That must be her reward.

* * * * *

At midnight, a white figure stood at Nancy's bedside. It was Alison, with a light in her hand. After a brief and curiously dry account of her adventure on her return home, she had gone to her room, but it was not to sleep.

'Nancy,' she now said, 'I'm going home!' Nancy sat up in her bed.

'Home, child?' she cried. 'What do you mean? Oh--no--no! You'd never leave me in my misery! You are frightened and upset. 'Twas an odious adventure--some trick of that beast Nicol. But to-morrow you'll be yourself again, Ally--my strength and comfort--my only one!'

'I got you the key,' said Alison, doggedly. 'I--I have done what I could. But now I'm going home, and you must not prevent me.'

Nancy burst into tears.

'Oh--Ally!' she sobbed, 'there's something between us!'

'Yes,' said Alison, dully, 'there's something between me and all the world from to-day. But I'll go home and hide myself--and forget. You'll not rise, Nancy,' she went on, 'for I've been to Jean and she will help me away. The coach goes at five--to-morrow is the day for it, you know, and I could not wait another week. I'll come in and say good-bye before I go.' Nancy turned her face to the wall, and sobbed and wept. But Alison's eyes were dry.

A few hours later she stood in Nancy's room again, in the grey dawn, hooded and cloaked for her journey. But her little friend had drugged herself into a deep sleep, and Alison did not wake her. In one of her tiny hands--the hand that had loaded Alison with easy kindness and covered her with a blame and shame not hers--was clasped the unlucky key. She breathed deeply and peacefully with parted lips--those lips made for laughter and for love--the swollen eyelids fringed and closed, the dark hair scattered on the pillow. Alison stood and looked at her long, without resentment, without love, without feeling of any kind, for feeling was numb with her now. Then she turned away, and went and kissed Willy in his sleep. And there were no other farewells.

'I doubt you are leaving us in trouble, Miss Ally!' said kindly Jean. She stood at the coach door--the March wind scattering the scanty locks upon her rough, broad forehead--loth to part from the young lady she had liked and served through all these winter weeks.

'Yes, Jean,' said Alison, sadly,' good-bye.'

'But, oo--it'll a' win richt i' the end?' said the cheerful woman, tentatively.

'No--never!' answered Alison, with the tremendous finality of youth.

The horn sounded, the whip cracked, and the lumbering vehicle lurched on its way. And so Alison went back to The Mains.

*CHAPTER XLI.*

It might have been about eight o'clock the next morning when Lizzie, the old housekeeper in George Street, thrust her head in at her master's door.

'Maircy me!' she exclaimed, and there was some cause for her wonder in the sight, at that hour, of candles burning in the broad day, and Herries at his desk, where, indeed, he had been all night.

Sleep had left him and thought had become intolerable. With an effort almost superhuman he had determined to lose himself in the technicalities of his work, and he had done it. But he now looked, with bloodshot eyes, his tumbled linen and disordered hair, the living image of dissipation rather than business. Lizzie eyed him most suspiciously. He never drank, but the censorious old woman believed he had been drinking.

'The Lord be gude to us!' she ejaculated, 'what's wrang? Wastin' waxen candles this gait!' And she blew them out, and snuffed them with her fingers. 'You're wanted,' she went on. 'There's a lad frae Creighton's wi' a message express. Ye maun gang there at aince anent the dog.'

'What about the dog?' said Herries.

'Weel,' said Lizzie, 'as far as I can get it frae the lad, the tyke is turned upon them all, and aye he sits girning by the corp, and they canna get it coffined. They're for you to gang and fleech him awa', or somethin' that gait.'

'I will come,' said Herries.

Creighton's unfortunate canine companion had given some trouble already, which Herries had not grudged. Within the hour of his master's death, when it was necessary that the last offices should be done, Herries had coaxed the poor starving brute from his post upon the bed, tempting him with a piece of meat. But no sooner was the morsel swallowed than the creature ran back to the room of death, and scratching at the door, pushed in and leapt upon the bed. Nothing had since dislodged him, and Herries had ordered him to be left in peace--a solitary mourner. It had been a mistaken kindness, for thirst had probably now turned the beast rabid. Herries took a pistol out of its case, and primed and loaded it. For Dick there could only be the kindly ultimatum of a bullet.

He went straight to Mr. Creighton's lodgings. It was the same March morning, windy, but now fair, which was seeing Alison on her sad way home. The wind cut him like a knife, though it was not really cold. He had eaten nothing for many hours, and a wretchedness of spirit was upon him, beyond anything that he had deemed it possible he could know.

In Creighton's room the coffin stood upon its trestles, and stiff and still, beneath the sheet upon the bed, lay its belated occupant. At the starkly upturned feet crouched the terrier, his red eyes glowing like cinders, at every slightest sound or movement drawing his lips back from his teeth in a rabid snarl. Herries approached him, with a half hope the dog would know him and be pacified, but the brute would have sprung at him in a moment. He drew back sufficiently far to take a deliberate and steady aim.

The shot rang out with terrific reverberation within the narrow, echoing limits of the empty room, which filled instantly with a blue and pungent smoke. When that cleared off, Herries perceived the dog had hardly moved, arrested in his crouching attitude by swift death. Presently a single scarlet trickle from behind his ear stained the whiteness of his master's shroud, his fierce eye dimmed and glazed, and his bristling body stiffened as it lay.

Herries, the smoking pistol in his hand, stood still a moment--in his disordered dress, and with his pale, set face and bloodshot eyes, a singularly haunting image of the suicide. But just as some men, too strong to swoon, must bear a physical agony to its last limit, so to Herries, with the accurately-balanced character of his intellect and his temper, the impulse of self-destruction could never come. He must bear, he would overcome: the iron will survived; the brain, active and restless, keen and clear, worked on--a finely-regulated mechanism. But his heart was empty, and from that moment he closed its portals on the world.

* * * * *

*CHAPTER XLII.*

Time, who is the great healer, does his work with admirable celerity for some. By the spring of that year, though there came to her in the early weeks of April the astounding news of Burns's marriage to Jean Armour, Mrs. Maclehose had resumed the peaceful tenor of her blameless existence as a cruelly deserted wife and anxious mother. This little vessel, so lightly rigged, so fairy-like, with sails and pennants spread for none but summer breezes, had encountered rough weather, but had survived with wonderfully little hurt. Helmsman and pilot, perchance, had suffered, and an honest seaman or so gone by the board; but the spirit of the little ship, undaunted, rode lightly on the calm. The little Edinburgh world of Mrs. Maclehose's acquaintances observed with edification her devotion to her delicate youngest boy. She, indeed, moved herself and her small household to Prestonpans for a season, where he lay. In the August of that year little Danny died, and it may be said most truthfully that no child ever winged his way from earth to heaven from tenderer maternal arms.

For all the rest of Nancy's doings are they not written in more books than one, so that he who runs may read? It is to be conjectured that her relations with her cousin became tacitly somewhat strained after the events recorded in this history, although there was no open quarrel. It seems probable that Herries, after Danny's death, and in the hardness of heart which grew upon him at this time, withdrew the superfluities, at anyrate, of the monetary assistance he had been in the habit of conveying to his relative.

This may have been one of the contributing causes to the curious impulse which, about the autumn of the year '91, moved Nancy to think of rejoining her long-lost husband, and induced her to undertake a voyage to the West Indies with that laudable end in view. The journey was not a success. She, indeed, found Mr. Maclehose with little difficulty, but she found along with him the partner of his exile, a swarthy lady of those climes, with a numerous coffee-colored progeny. And this discovery so shocked the moral sensibilities of the little lady, who had regarded with a lenient eye the amorous delinquencies of her Sylvander, that she incontinently fled the marital premises, and returned to Leith in the same vessel that had brought her out. The most remarkable feature of this episode is the fact that Robert Burns, although at this time nearly three years married, did indubitably come to Edinburgh to seek a farewell interview with his Clarinda. How they two met, with what feelings, with what memories, who shall be bold enough to say? The world, at least, became infinitely the richer for this parting and for poor Clarinda's absence. For the poet's soul was stirred, and soon fine Edinburgh ladies at the harp and spinet, and country lasses at their milking, were singing, to its melting air,--

_'Now in her green mantle blythe Nature arrays,_ _And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes,_ _While birds warble welcome in ilka green show,_ _But to me it's delightless--my Nannie's awa'._

_The snaw-drap and primrose our woodlands adorn,_ _And violets bathe in the weet o' the morn;_ _They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blow,_ _They mind me o' Nannie--and Nannie's awa'._

_Thou lav'rock that springs frae the dews o' the lawn,_ _The shepherd to warn o' the grey-breaking dawn;_ _And thou mellow mavis that hails the night-fa'_ _Give over for pity--my Nannie's awa'.'_

And also of this curious farewell were born those lines in which is reached, perhaps, the very topmost summit of the lyrical genius of Burns--those lines which are the epitome of all love-tragedy--of all hopeless passion--of all parting woe. And these shall the painstaking reader, who toils to the end of this history, read on the last page for his reward.

Sylvander and Clarinda continued to correspond with considerable desultoriness during the few years of life that remained to the Rhymer, and sad to state, in these communications there is to be traced a very decided recriminative tartness, which is a blow to the ingenuous and sentimental reader. So sputtered out, in rather fiery sparks--as, indeed, is the too common wont of such--one of the most curious of the world's classic flirtations.

Mrs. Maclehose lived to a great age, becoming a most _espiegle_ and charming old lady--the centre of a large and admiring acquaintance. Years after the poet's death, when all danger was over, and passion, too, dead, it was her chief boast, her 'meed of fame,' to figure as Burns's 'Clarinda.' She kept, and would exhibit, many little souvenirs of the Bard, and on all matters pertaining to the history of his Edinburgh visits, she was for many years the greatest living authority. She publicly and impartially would maintain till the last that the poet's marriage with a peasant was the greatest mistake of his life, dragging him down to a low level, intellectually as well as socially; whereas with higher companionship he might have risen to heights incalculably nobler, both of prosperity and of fame. To her dying day she expressed a pious wish that she might meet in heaven the Bard whose soul she felt that she alone had understood as it deserved in the imperfect communionship of earth. All things considered, the hope of meeting in quite another quarter might have seemed more justifiable. But so--exit our charming Nancy from these veracious pages.

To Herries, meanwhile, in his house in George Street, these years brought solitary success and lonely gain. He set himself to his work with an iron determination to forget the past, and it seemed that he succeeded. To him Alison Graham was dead, as truly dead as though she lay in yonder graveyard under the shadow of the Castle rock, with a great stone to weight her down until the Judgment Day. He never thought of her at all. He never pictured his room now as a drawing-room, with gracious feminine appurtenances; it was the office, pure and simple. In Creighton's room below worked his new partner, a young and stirring man. The business extended itself in all directions and flourished like a miracle. Some of the most resounding names in Scotland figured on the green tin boxes, in their yearly increasing phalanx, in Herries's room. He had the name of a hard man, and was, no doubt, rather feared than loved. But so he willed it--for he had had enough of love. Round him, in these busy years, grew wider and yet wider the gallant New Town of Edinburgh--curving into crescents, and widening into squares and handsome residential streets. More and more, the genteel world gravitated to this quarter, and left the Old Town to the squalor of decay. Herries, for one, never visited the old streets and closes--giving in, no doubt, to the new fashion. The High Street was his limit; the devious and narrow ways which led to the Potterrow knew him no more.

And meanwhile, down in the rich south country, in the little white farmhouse among the broom, on the bonny banks of Nith, Robert Burns pursued the downward tenor of his way. Poet and exciseman, farmer and bard: the kindly husband and father, the incorrigible rake: the eager host, the far too frequent--and far, far too uproariously welcomed--guest: the copious correspondent, the ill-balanced politician: the reckless, eager, revolutionary spirit, the remorse-stricken, disappointed, penitent man; at once affectionate and quarrelsome--losing friend after friend, and tiring out the patience of men and women who would fain have befriended him to the last; quixotically generous in money matters, refusing money for his songs, and then forced to accept, in grinding bitterness of spirit, the eleemosynary five-pound note under pressure of inexorable necessity--so he stands out, a tragic figure for all time, the presiding genius, the Rhymer of the North. Too soon the fair page--or that which had promised so fair--of the life at Elliesland had to be turned down, the stock and plenishing of the little farm scattered and sold, and the patient Jean and her little flock of helpless bairns made to flit sadly to Dumfries. Here the temptations of the country town and its taverns soon finished what the too trying and demoralising routine of the Excise had begun; and in the squalor of excess--in sadness, illness, disillusionment and pain--the shining light of genius grew dim, and flickered to extinction.

*CHAPTER XLIII.*

As time went on, and his fortune accumulated, there came to Archibald Herries that impulse which generally visits the laborious and land-loving Scot at some period of his career--the impulse to possess himself of territorial acres--the ancestral ones if possible. The family from which Herries sprang had owned land in the Galloway region, or near about Kirkcudbright. It occurred to him suddenly, in the summer of '96, when town was empty, and the grass growing up between the cobbles of the Edinburgh streets, after its rural wont, that he would take a tour in the South and re-visit the country of his sires. He set out with a couple of good nags--one ridden by his servant, with a pack-saddle.

It was a successful expedition (all worldly matters prospered with Herries in these days), and in more ways than in mere pleasure. Not only did he see the country to advantage in the fine summer weather, but he discovered that a small property, with its excellent mansion house, which had once been the ancient possession of a younger branch of his family, was for sale. There seemed no reason--certainly not want of funds--why he should not become the purchaser. It might have occurred to him to ask himself why he, unmarried and childless, should burden himself with acres never to become an inheritance. But no such consideration gave him pause. He was inwardly determined that, at the first moment he thought fit to do so, he should marry--ay, and beget sons to carry on his name and fame. True, that moment had never come; but it was not for love's sake that it tarried--or so he was convinced.

It was on his return journey that he stayed for a few nights at Dumfries. With his pleasure-trip he had combined a certain modicum of business, and the affairs of an important client detained him in the country-town longer than he meant. In the long, summer evenings he would stroll about the streets, losing himself in its little vennels and closes, and stopping every now and then to stare about him, as a man will in a place that is strange to him. That Dumfries was becoming famous as the last home of the man who had practically ruined his life, Herries may have known, but only vaguely. The fashionable world had dropped the poet Burns. The town roared over 'Tam o' Shanter' when it appeared, but forgot to pension the unlucky bard struggling with his poverty on the banks of Nith.

It was one morning, as he sat at breakfast in his tavern, that a messenger brought Herries a note. It was written in a sprawling, uncertain hand, and was unsigned, undated and unaddressed. It ran--'A dying fellow-creature uses the privilege of his sad condition to summon Mr. Herries to his house. It may be that Mr. Herries will there hear that which might be of importance to his affairs.' Herries turned the note over with an incredulous smile. Who in Dumfries could know of anything that was of importance to him? A little boy waited to guide him to the house of his correspondent. Herries thought that he would go. The mystery would help to pass an idle morning.

The child led him a little way down the hill, and guided him to a small and humble street called, as Herries observed, the Wee Vennel. They stopped before a decent two-storeyed house, like an artisan's dwelling of the better class.

'Here, my boy,' said Herries, giving the child a shilling, 'can't you tell me who it is that desires to see me?'

'No. I was not to say, sir,' answered the boy. He was a fine little fellow of about nine or ten, and as he spoke he raised his large black eyes--surely Herries had seen eyes just like these before--to the stranger's face.

The door was opened by a quiet-looking, young woman with a sweet face, but Herries did not then observe her with any particularity. She asked him gently to walk upstairs. At the door of a room opening to the left, she paused.

'You will be very quiet, will you not, sir?' she asked. 'You'll not excite him? He has not long to live.' She had a quiet, controlled, and yet a very sad voice. Herries then noticed her wedding-ring, and also the fact that she seemed very near her time. She opened the door to the sick-room, and left him.

The room was cross-lighted by two windows set in opposite walls, and by one of these, which was opened to the street and to the summer air and sunshine, was drawn a great chair, where someone sat, propped by a pile of pillows. A very pretty young girl in the rustic style sat near with an open book upon her knee, from which she had been reading aloud. She rose as Herries entered, and quietly left the room. It was Jessie Lewars, a neighbour's pretty daughter, who helped to minister to the dying poet--an innocent type of much that had been the reverse of innocent in his life--a characteristic attendant enough. Not as yet had the faintest warning reached Herries in whose presence it was that, after eight years of silent hatred, he stood. Something of awe, indeed, held him, for he recognised by instinct the atmosphere of death. But he walked up to the chair in total unsuspicion, mechanically holding out a hand. And then a voice arrested him.

'Nay, not yet, sir!' said Burns. 'Wait! When once before you met me, you held your hand behind you. It may be you'll put it back again before we've done.'

Herries started violently, and his hand dropped to his side, for now he saw and knew his enemy.