Part 18

But this--this deathlike image--could it indeed be Robert Burns? The last time that Herries had seen him--that only too memorable time--he had been in the hey-day of his splendid manhood, flushed with wine and bold with license, handsome as Bacchus, careless of mankind--balancing on the corner of a table in unblushing drunkenness. Now, a spectre faced the amazed intruder--hollow-eyed and fever-haunted, the bony frame of a skeleton, the traces of death's clayey finger on cheek and temple, lip and brow. Only the eyes glowed with their wonted and sombre fire; they seemed to look Herries through and through--to read the secrets of his heart. In spite of the old hatred, and battling with the old contempt, there struggled into Herries's sensations an unwilling reverence. All through what seemed to him the fantastic interview which ensued he strove with bitterness to assert himself. But it was with the curious and baffling consciousness that a greater than himself, albeit stained with a thousand sins and follies, strove with him and held him down.

*CHAPTER XLIV.*

'Will you not be seated, sir?' said Burns, pointing to the chair which Jessie Lewars had vacated. Herries, with a gesture and an inclination, intimated his wish to stand; and throughout the interview he continued to do so at some little distance from the sick man, his head bent, his eyes upon the ground, save when they were raised to meet the poet's dark and penetrating gaze.

'Now, sir,' the Bard began, raising himself with difficulty in his chair, 'have patience while you listen to me. You owe me the hearing which the dying may exact from those they leave behind.'

'I will listen to you,' said Herries, shortly.

'Last night,' continued Burns; 'these two or three nights, indeed, I have seen you pass my door, unwitting; for here I sit with a sick man's look-out upon the world he must soon leave. I remembered you, and a bit of the Devil's work I did when the wine was red and ginger hot in the mouth came back to me, for it concerned your house. I have gossips in the town--too many, perhaps--and I soon heard that the great Edinburgh lawyer, Mr. Herries, was abiding at the "Globe," alone, but for his servant. Now, why alone?' The questioner's dark eye rested upon Herries's with a look half quizzical, half sombre.

'Where is man's God-given companion--where is the wife, sir?'

'I have no wife,' said Herries, sternly, most bitterly resenting the allusion to his private matters--yet, somehow, held by the overpowering personality of his interlocutor.

'What?' cried Burns. 'Then where is the lass that you loved--for you did love her--the big, bonny body wi' the bunch o' curls? Well I mind her, though she liked me little!'

'If you speak of Miss Graham,' said Herries, his lips hardly able to form the name, 'I have never seen her or heard of her since the night I took her from your house.'

'Man alive!' ejaculated the poet, staring at his guest in blank astonishment. 'Is it possible? That there was a mischief brewing through some trickery of that sour devil, Nicol, I knew--fu' though I was, and roarin' fu' that night. But, as I live, I never thought but that you and the lass would kiss and make it up or ever you got the length of Princes Street!'

'Was I to take a sweetheart from your chamber?' said Herries, with a sneer.

'But, surely,' cried Burns, 'surely you knew the lass was there against her will? She had come on some cantrip of my Clarinda--well, I must e'en be plain, your cousin, Mrs. Maclehose; we had some trifle of dalliance in those days, and your girl was Cupid's messenger--just once too often, it would seem.'

'But she as good as told me with her own lips,' said Herries, 'that the disgrace of her situation was her own, and that she had deceived me....'

'Then she lied!' said Burns, energetically, 'and lied to save her friend, who was indeed most particularly in terror that your honour's self should scent her little game.... Listen, sir. I was never one to tell when I had kissed, but I must e'en out with it now. Here's a grave matter that needs more clearing even than I thought--and your own relative's honour is surely as safe with you as with me. The little lady thrives, I hear, on the fairest pinnacle of good fame, and you would be the last to interrupt her prosperity. But in those merry days she had a kindly eye for a poor Bard--and troth, so had the Bard for her--and we had--well, sundry tender passages and letters, though all within the strictest limits of Platonic friendship. And then there was your bonny lass--may God forgive us for the use we put her innocence to!--forever the go-between. Yet, sir, before real harm was done, I had compounded with my conscience to break with my Clarinda once and forever. Then came your ... Do you remember your letter?'

'I remember a letter,' said Herries, moodily, 'in which I forbade you my cousin's house....'

'Ay!' cried Burns, 'and what right had you, or any fellow-creature, to hector, catechise and insult me as did you in that letter? To a man of my temper, 'twas intolerable, and every drop of black blood in my veins rose at the injury. I had the creature Nicol at my elbow, and he made me write some trash--I mind not what--to you. But the real mischief was that your ill-judged and insolent order sent me, by provocation, hot-foot to your cousin's--ay, by night, too--and we were alone.... I outstayed--indeed, I did most damnably outstay, decorum's hour--and I will not say what devil whispered in my ear ... for opportunity and the fair one both were kind. Then there comes upon us, out of her first sleep, the lassie Graham. Ecod! I see her yet--the round eyes of her, like a bairn's, staring at me; the flounces of her night-rail, her bare bit feet. Up she comes, and takes the woman from my very arms into her own, as had she been an infant, showing me the door the while wi' the gait o' a queen. 'Od, 'tis not often Robbie Burns has played so poor a part in an affair of that kind! I e'en slunk out o' the house like a whipped tyke wi' his tail atween his legs. And so the lass better'd me--and maybe saved the honour of your house. And for all reward you cast her off!' Herries had turned from white to red, and from red to white again, during this recital. But now his eyes glittered with a cold anger.

'You are utterly unjust as to my part in the affair,' he said deliberately. 'Your own letter, which you slur over so easily, was a tissue of falsehood--if what you now tell me be true--and it was written with intent to mislead me. Every word and every act of my cousin's was studied to the same end. I was hedged in with lies. Of those who wronged Miss Graham, I certainly was not the guilty one; I utterly deny it. I was the catspaw of others infinitely unscrupulous. If I did Miss Graham an injustice, I deeply deplore it; but I was not responsible.' Burns eyed the speaker long and curiously--ironically, indeed.

'The legal mind, I see, sir, lights on the cold justice of the case at once, and banishes emotion and romance,' he said. 'Let me tell you, here and now, how I repent my part in the unlucky business. The letter I sent you was Nicol's, in truth, and not mine. In a sober mood I'd not have lent myself to such a trick; but I was drunk, and there was my disgrace. I ask your pardon, as one erring human being asks pardon of another, who, in his turn, must be a supplicant for grace before the Throne of God.... Or is Mr. Herries, indeed, above his fellows, and in no need of pity and forgiveness from above?' Herries frowned--the annoyed frown of a man to whom heroics are distasteful.

'It is a Christian duty to forgive,' he said coldly. 'Your injury to me I do forgive, but your injury to another was far deeper, and confession and repentance, sir, have come a little late.'

'But not too late for reparation!' cried the poet, eagerly. 'Does your heart not warm again to that wronged lassie? 'Od, my own blood, that runs like ice in these congealing veins, leaps at the thought of her! I cannot get to her--I'll never see her face again--for earth will be upon these eyes, and the great darkness.... But I will bless her with the blessing of the dying--'tis all I have.... But you, sir--you--you have a horse, you've health and strength and time--a heart, I'd hope ... surely you will go to her--fly to her--losing not a day!'

'After a few hours' reflection,' said Herries, with a consciously exaggerated coldness, 'I shall be the better judge of how to act. In the meantime, although I do not doubt your statement, I should like proof positive that your memory does not play you false.'

'Most noble judge!' said Burns, with bitter irony, 'it shall be yours! The sacred pages of my Clarinda's letters will be proof-positive enough in all conscience, and you shall see them. They are safe with you. I'll have the packet searched for, and to-morrow, if you will trouble to call, it shall be delivered to your hands.'

'To-morrow,' said Herries, 'I shall be absent at B---- on the Duke's business, and perhaps for two days; but on my return I will do myself the honour to call.'

'I may not be here,' said Burns, significantly. 'But, no matter, the letters will be ready.' He paused. The two men looked at each other in silence--antipathetic to the last--across a gulf of mutual misunderstanding, that not years of speech or explanation could have bridged over. The ardent and impulsive temperament of Burns might indeed have leapt the chasm, and he longed even now for a reconciliation with the man he had wronged--a reconciliation with warm, heartfelt words, and a clasp of the hand. But to Herries, hedged about with the prejudices of a lifetime--to Herries, just, but cold--even the semblance of reconciliation was impossible. It was Burns who spoke next, in a gentler voice, and with a kindly shrewdness in his eyes.

'How well it would be, sir,' he said, 'could nature sometimes mix her handiwork! Had I, now, some of your excellent qualities of judgment and coolness, how much more wisely should I have waged the war of life! And you, methinks, might be a little better for a few drops of the hot blood that has been the plague of me all my days. But we are as God made us, and the Devil spoiled us, and to make or mar is seemingly little in our own power.' The poet's voice had become fainter, and the excitement which had upheld him throughout the interview began to wane. His excessive weakness became apparent, as he leaned back against the pillows, with closing eyes. Herries came nearer to him for the first time.

'You have stretched a great point for me, Mr. Burns,' he said, 'in that you have undertaken this interview when you were so little able to bear the strain. I admire your fortitude, and I beg to thank you for the unselfish effort. I see how it has worn you out, and I will leave you now, and call your nurse.' The poet opened his eyes, and fixed them on the younger man with an indescribably yearning look.

'I would do better now,' he said, 'to pray than to preach! There is one prayer for us all, Mr. Herries--for you--for me: "_Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors!_"'

'Amen!' said Herries, with the first ring of emotion in his voice. Then, with a deep inclination, he silently left the room.

*CHAPTER XLV.*

It took Herries three full days to accomplish the business of which he had spoken to the poet. When he returned to Dumfries, the town was ringing with the death of Burns. A suppressed excitement seemed to pervade the streets; men spoke in muffled voices, awe-stricken, of the great spirit fled--and women cried to think of the destitute young widow, with her flock of orphans, who must so soon, in double peril, and under the very shadow of death, give to the world the poet's posthumous child.

Herries felt a great delicacy in presenting himself at the house of mourning, and yet time pressed, and the possession of the letters was of vital importance to him. He waited one day, and then, on the morning of his departure, directed his steps to the Wee Vennel. This time the door was opened to him by Jessie Lewars, her pretty face swollen and discoloured by tears.

'I was directed by--by the late Mr. Burns to call here for a packet of letters,' said Herries, with respectful hesitancy.

'We were bidden to expect you, sir,' answered the girl, and then she added that invitation which, under the circumstances, among the peasantry of Scotland, is never withheld and never refused: 'Will you be pleased to come up the stair and view the corpse, sir?' Herries followed her upstairs, but she did not enter the room with him. He was left to do that alone.

It was the same room in which he had spoken with the poet, but now swept and garnished, and with a Puritan simplicity and dignity in its poor belongings that went strangely to the heart. The widow rose from her seat at the bed's head. Herries had seen her before, but only now realised that this must be Jean Armour. With a singularly unaffected gesture of restrained and decent sorrow, she removed, in silence, the fair white linen kerchief that covered the face of her dead. Herries, with folded arms, and with a singular mixture of emotions, looked long upon the splendid mask. As in life, the dark hair swept the pallid brow, and though the glory of those eyes was quenched under the sealed lids that would lift no more, there was, in the fixed and immutable gravity of the lifeless face, a language beyond all looks, beyond all uttered speech: that air of incommunicable knowledge which, in the Dead, baffles the living with its eternal silence.

After a few minutes the widow, gently and reverently, covered the face once more.

'It was to be,' she said simply, with the quiet fatalism of her class. She turned and took from the table a packet of letters, and handed them to Herries without a word. He noted the quivering of her bloodless lip, but noted, too, the mild placidity of her wise, broad brow. Without some such element of enduring calm, never, surely, could Jean Armour have met the complicated trials of her life.

Herries took the letters from her with an almost humble reverence, and, strangely subdued in spirit, left the house and journeyed from the town.

* * * * *

As Herries, thus leaving Dumfries, turned his horse's head to the north, he was still undecided as to the precise direction he must take. Northwards he must go, but whether straight to Edinburgh, or, with a divergence to the west which would lead him to the home of the woman he had once loved, he could not, deeply though he hated indecision, make up his mind. A singular mood of coldness and hesitancy was upon him, and he could not shake it off. Yet it would be wrong to judge Herries, even now, as a man without feelings; he had feelings, but naturally so deeply hid, and, of late years, so sternly repressed, so purposely held down, that he began to doubt their existence in himself. Where was the enthusiasm, the chivalrous ardour that should have urged him on an errand like this: that errand--a privilege, surely, to any generous man--of reparation to a noble and innocent woman for a cruel wrong? This was his errand now, but it left him cold. No gush of revived passion stirred his heart; he seemed to himself to have become old and pulseless, and, unconsciously, he pictured Alison the same--old too, past feeling. Was she alive or dead? He did not know. Married, perhaps? It might well be, and with another man's children at her knee. She had acted nobly, bravely, in that miserable episode of the past. Well--perhaps--and yet Herries was not even in sympathy with the note of sacrifice in her act. It angered him rather--the injustice, the cruelty of it, and the total unworthiness, in his view, of her for whom the sacrifice had been made. Alison had held Nancy's honour as dearer than his--Herries's--happiness, and had sacrificed him, as well as herself, to her ideas of loyalty to a friend. He doubted whether she had done well: to his present cold mood there seemed a something less noble than quixotism in this--a touch of womanish hysterics. His own part in the affair he felt must be a source of bitterness to him that could never die; yet he would not allow that there could be any element in it whatsoever of remorse. His had been the dupe's part, and, to a man of Herries's proud temper, that was a galling thought, however it might lessen his responsibility. The woman in whom he had believed had been made to appear to him as unworthy of belief--by evidences so strong that to doubt them must have been to doubt the testimony of his senses and his sanity. He had cast her off, but it had not been without question. He had been stern, perhaps--but, in his opinion, it behoved men to be stern where honour was concerned. He had been tricked, and though it was not Alison who tricked him, yet she had connived at the trickery, and stood by and seen him made a fool of. As he went on his way, riding slowly, and resting often, he would take out and read those letters which had been given up to him--those fevered letters of 'Clarinda'--which certainly cleared Alison of every kind of blame, save that of a too yielding good-nature to her unscrupulous friend. How they enraged him, as he read--just as their writer used to do in days gone by--with what an impotent rage against this trivial feminine thing that he despised, and yet that had had power enough almost to ruin his life! Yet the letters brought decision, for they shaped his course, which now definitely took the westward route, towards the Perthshire highlands.

All this time, as he pondered, he had been riding through the classic country--sacred even then, as it is still, to the genius and the name of Burns. He had taken his way along the broad and river-haunted valley of the Nith; he had threaded the wild and hilly country of the Cumnocks; he had rested at Mauchline, and might have seen, without knowing it, Mossgiel. All around him, rich and fair, yellow now to its abundant harvests, spread the country that had nursed the peasant poet to his Titanic manhood--noble valley--rolling river--fertile plain. The lowly farms were eloquent of him; each humble implement of toil--the plough, the harrow and the reaper's hook--spoke of the hardy labours of his strenuous youth. The woods whispered of him; the summer evening breathed the legend of his first idyllic love--seemed instinct with the young undoing of Jean Armour, with the kiss, the jest, the gaiety of rustic courtship. At inn and toll, at kirk and market--yet rang the echoes of his splendid joviality, and by haunted kirkyard wall, and clattering arch and hoary brig, it seemed as though you yet might hear the thundering hoofs of flying Tam o' Shanter's auld mare Maggie. One name only seemed ever on the lips of men and women--and Herries heard it, as it seemed to him, wherever he rode, wherever he rested, wherever he spoke, or ate or slept upon that memorable journey. Strange irony of fate that should lead him--the instinctive enemy of the dead poet--antipathetic to him in every thought and impulse and idea--to haunt these scenes. Stranger still that he should come to them fresh from the last great scene of all--the closing scene in that tremendous tragedy of a poet's life. Even Herries--unimaginative, unsympathetic, cold--felt the coincidence, and felt with it some singular, reluctant, vague understanding of the spirit that had passed away, even though his own wrongs, and the deeper wrongs of another, from the dead man's very hand, cried out for their too-long-delayed redress.

In this unwonted and unwelcome mingling of moods, he took his way, riding up the western coasts from Ayr, crossing the Clyde near Glasgow, striking inland to the mountain land up by Loch Lomond, through the exquisite wild Highland country of Glen Falloch; and so, by pass and glen, and wood and water, fertile strath and harvest fields, down to the lowlands again, and the tamer country of the Ochills. One summer night found him, at length, at the last gate of the Highlands, the little town of C----, and he knew that he rested but two miles from Alison's home, if indeed Alison were still Alison Graham and had a home at The Mains.

*CHAPTER XLVI.*

Away down at The Mains it was high summer, and the low-lying, wood-encircled old white house lay brooding in the August heat. The bees hummed in the lime tree, and in the spruce woods the pigeons crooned all day, but the rooks in the plane trees kept their cawing till the evening.

But in these days there were great changes at The Mains; not only those deliberate changes, due to the slow workings of nature, which are common to the obscure places of the world, but the more violent ones which come of the striving and the energy of man, or rather woman. In the first place, Mrs. Graham, that tremendous creature, had married all her daughters, every one, save, indeed, the predestined old maid of the family, who, though she had had (as her mother frequently reminded her) the best chances of them all, in an Edinburgh season, was mateless still. By remorseless energy, by ceaseless harping on the subject, had this stringent mother goaded six daughters into matrimony against tremendous odds. One, as we know, had 'taken' Mr. Cheape; two had married ministers--albeit one had been a 'wanter,' i.e., a widower, with a numerous infant family. Another had captured a soldier lad, a subaltern in a marching regiment, quartered, during some manoeuvres of the County Militia, at the town of C----. Yet another had espoused a surgeon, while one, alas! the pretty Sally, barely at sixteen, had run away with a handsome shepherd off her father's farm. Hot was the hue and cry after the misguided lassie; her father spurred to overtake the couple and prevent the union, but returned crestfallen--thankful, eventually, to have been shown the marriage lines. This episode was no great feather in the maternal cap, and poor Sally's name was conspicuously absent from the fly-leaf of the family Bible. The mistress of The Mains now rested from her match-making labours, and devoted, henceforth, all her energies to the insane indulgence of her only son--now a pampered and disagreeable boy of ten.

In these times would Mrs. Graham publicly announce among her neighbours that she did not intend to marry off her daughter Alison. Disgraceful though it was to have a girl left on your hands, yet one unmarried daughter was not unuseful. Jacky would need a housekeeper until he married. After that great event, Alison's future might be nebulous, but in no case was it a matter of very great importance.

In the meantime, useful occupation was not lacking to Miss Graham of The Mains. In these changed days, she had, besides her household work and poultry-keeping, certain grave and tender duties which kept her much confined to the house, even in this lovely summer time. It was to get a few moments' respite from these, and a mouthful of fresh air, that she would steal out, bare-headed, on the drowsy afternoons, and wander in the garden. One day (it was, indeed, the day after Herries's arrival in the country), she did this, having in charge, however, her brother. The mistress of The Mains was absent on a drive to visit a distant neighbour, and in her absence the precious heir was never trusted a moment by himself.