Part 19

Jacky wished to go and climb upon a wall which was being built round the old, and hitherto only hedged, garden. So far but a few yards had been completed--the broad parapet offering a tempting promenade for youthful agility. It was a forbidden joy, but such things, to the spoilt child, are ever only nominally forbidden, and Alison, by sage experience, was aware that protest would be only waste of time. Jacky, therefore, pranced upon the wall, deftly cracking a huge carter's whip--his latest acquisition, which he had already made a terror to every man and woman at The Mains. He was now a fat, overgrown and hearty boy, with long, fair, effeminate ringlets, which a fond maternal hand could not bring itself to shear, and which assorted ill enough with the sturdy and thick-set appearance of the youthful heir.

For a little while he strutted all content, and Alison stepped about the sweet old garden in the sun, and picked herself a little bunch of white clove pinks, and stuck them in her dress. But her moments of respite were soon numbered.

'Come now, Jacky,' she called, going to the wall's foot; 'come down like a good boy! You know I must go in to father.'

'I'm no comin',' said Jacky, with the serene finality of the spoilt child.

'Ah--but you must,' pleaded his sister, 'for mother would never have you left upon the dyke your lone, and father wants me.' But Jacky paid no heed.

'I'll have to come and pull you down,' said Alison, rashly going nearer.

'Ye'll no!' said Jacky, with a deft swirl of his whip. It cracked like a pistol shot on the silent summer air, and the tip of the lash caught Alison on the ear, so that she clapped her hand to the place with a little cry of pain.

'Ah, Jacky,' she cried, 'you've hurt me now.' But Jacky--a fiendish, little, spoilt wretch--only laughed.

Nemesis, however, hovered behind him, for there had been an unsuspected witness to the scene. A gentleman on horseback had come down the road which passed close to the new wall, and, attracted by the repeated cracking of a whip, had paused. Finally he had dismounted, tied his horse to a gate-post, and, standing a little way off from the end of the unfinished dyke, could see and hear what happened both above and below. While Alison, the tears of her smart in her eyes, still expostulated vainly with her brother, she was suddenly electrified to perceive his ankles clasped by two hands from the other side of the wall. With a sharp howl of terror, the heir of all the Grahams disappeared abruptly from his perch. Alison ran round the dyke, and lo! with the roaring Jacky struggling in his arms, there was Archibald Herries, or his ghost.

Alison stopped dead, and the two, with eight years between them of pain, and parting, and estrangement, stood staring at each other--so strange is human life--upon the verge of laughter. Herries released the boy, who ran yelling to the house, and then, flushed and awkward, he stood before Alison.

'I--I am come to The Mains, you see,' he stammered, not brilliantly, it must be confessed.

'I see, sir,' said Alison, a little giddily. (How sweet, how strong--too strong--the pinks smelt in her dress!) 'But you are like to have an odd welcome,' she went on, in a queer, steady voice, and yet with a little uncertain laugh, 'if you begin like this, by beating Jacky. 'Tis a providence has sent my mother from home this day, or you would be like to get into her black books.'

The summer world, the trees, the sky were reeling round her, but she kept her head, better, indeed, than did the man. He, dumb, stood looking at her, while the world, his world, changed round him, like the world of dreams. What had he expected to see?--a faded woman past her prime? Alison was twenty-eight now, but at twenty-eight, young women living quiet country lives are neither old nor faded as a common rule. She was a girl yet, the flush of summer on her cheeks, not the tendril of a curl changed; bewitching womanliness was in the sweet curves of her young body beneath the cotton gown. Her eyes seemed larger than of yore, perhaps because the face had fined away a little from mere girlish chubbiness to slightly hollower lines of cheek and chin. Her soft, broad forehead knit itself a little. Herries felt his heart go from him, and his cool head swam. He tried to keep command of himself, but himself--the self of all these barren years--was slipping from him even now.

'Can I--can I have a few words with you alone?' he asked humbly.

'Surely, sir,' said Alison. 'But I cannot spare you many minutes, for I am wanted.' A look of pain, of harassed anxiety, came into her eyes, which should have been an omen. But Herries did not see it. They began to walk in the garden, on a grass path between yew hedges.

'Have you seen Nancy lately, and is she well?' asked Alison, breaking the silence.

'I never see her,' said Herries, shortly. 'Have you dropped all knowledge of her too?'

'At first we wrote a little,' said Alison, quietly, 'but I am no great hand at letters, sir, and so--and so we grew apart.'

'That's well,' said Herries, abruptly. He chafed at this dull talk, walking at Alison's side, but what to say, where to begin? He stole a look at her. 'Alison,' he cried suddenly, 'your ear hurts. That little monster cut it with the lash; it bleeds.'

'Does it?' said Alison, faintly, putting up her hand.

'Wait--here!' said Herries, eagerly. 'I have a soft silk kerchief.' He noted, with a kind of anguish, the smudge of blood upon a little curl, and yet thought himself cool enough to wipe it away unmoved. But the touch, the contact, the terrible sweetness of approach were all too much. The pent-up tenderness of years would be denied no longer--his empty arms rebelled against their emptiness.

'Ally!' he cried. 'Oh! Ally--oh, my soul!'

For, indeed, it did seem as though, after all these years of deathly trance, his soul had come back to him.

*CHAPTER XLVII.*

And now Herries, who had found an advocate, became his own accuser.

'That you can forgive me this long and cruel silence is impossible,' said the man who had hitherto held himself so proudly blameless.

'Nay, there's nothing to forgive in you,' said the fond woman, who held him blameless still. 'Do you think I did not know you?' she went on softly. 'I knew that you, being you, must have acted as you did. And I said to myself I would abide by your action, whatever it was, for I knew it would be just!'

'If it was not my action that was sorely wrong,' said Herries, in his new contrition, 'then it was something deeper. 'Twas my heart and nature that erred; to doubt yon was a cold-hearted, an abominable crime!' But Alison only smiled.

'If you had erred,' she said, 'it might have been easier for me, for then I might have found some comfort in thinking you unworthy. But no, I would not, for all the world, have had it so! I'd rather have borne the hardness of our parting than that!'

'Was it--was it so very hard--to you?' whispered Herries.

'Is it hard when the nest and the young ones are torn from the bird, do you think?' said Alison. 'If that is hard, my suffering was like it; for all that I had went from me when I went from you!' Herries sighed, and memory tormented him. He heard the plashing rain upon the pavement--the rain of that night of parting; he saw the white face that Alison turned upon him from the window of the sedan as the chairmen carried her away into the darkness.

'May God pardon me the hardness of my heart,' he said, raising the hat from his head, 'for I'll never forgive myself as long as I live.'

They spoke of Robert Burns, and they spoke of Nancy, unravelling that terrible entanglement of the past. Herries spoke with a new gentleness, and Alison, as she heard him, pressed close to his side.

'You forgive them--you do forgive them--don't you, Archie?' she whispered. 'For, you know, Nancy never dreamed how deeply she injured us, and he--the man--knew not what he did. We cannot be happy if we leave them unforgiven!' Herries did not answer, for his heart was big within him, and in his ears was the sound of a voice, now stilled for ever, pleading for that forgiveness which the sweet woman at his side now urged upon him.

'"_Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors!_"' said he, at last, in the same words, and they fell from him with a sigh.

'I must go now,' said Alison, at last, 'for I dare not linger. I have stayed too long.'

'Nay, but I'll not let you, Alison,' said Herries, 'till it is promised me that our parting is at an end, and that I can come and ask you of your parents this very day. Why not?' Alison stood still and looked at him, and in her eyes was a something akin to that compassion with which you will see a mother look at her careless and unconscious child.

'Nay, Archie,' she said faintly. 'I had been thinking that you knew.... But that's all gone and done with now. I have no freedom to go with any man. I cannot leave my home.'

'But, by the God that is above us, you shall--and with me!' said Herries, violently. 'I will permit no second sacrifice of our love and life.'

'Come with me--home, Archie,' said Alison, gently, 'and I'll show you what I cannot tell you.' In a brooding silence they went to unloose Herries's horse, which had pawed the ground beneath him to a pulp. A lad took it from them as they went towards the house. 'I am taking you to my father's room,' said Alison, in a low voice. She led him down the dark narrow passage to the library.

'Here are two steps in the dark--take care,' she whispered, and as he stumbled he felt her guiding hand come out to him. She opened the library door, and in the warm light of the summer evening that came in through the little deep-set windows, Herries saw the laird of The Mains.

Alas! for the four-bottle man--our jovial ancestor of a drinking age! His life may have been a merry one, but it was generally short, and often before middle age the gout would get him at his vitals, or deathly paralysis lay him by the heels. It was the latter vengeance that had overtaken the laird of The Mains--pinning him helpless, and almost speechless, to his great lug-chair by the fire for which he shivered even in the hottest day. There he sat, huddled in gown and slippers, the wreck of a man at fifty-six, and behind him, rudely carved upon the green stone mantel, Herries read the doleful legend, which seemed the text of a wordless but expressive sermon:

_'In human life there's nothing steadfast stands,_ _Youth, Glorie, Riches fades. Death's sure at hand.'_

Hardly anything of the sick man could move but his eyes, and these turned upon his daughter as she entered with a dog-like look of expectation, while he set up a painful, inarticulate cry for water--for he was tormented by an insatiable and raging thirst.

''Tis ever so, if I leave him for but half-an-hour,' said Alison, in a low voice. 'No one comes to him; they let his cup be empty and his fire go out. Oh, I've been cruel to leave him so long,' she cried, with a pang of remorse. She held the cup to his lips, and in her strong young arms raised the supine and helpless form against the pillows. Herries, inexpressibly shocked, with a sense of foreboding against which he vainly strove, watched her.

'But, Alison!' he whispered, passionately, 'this--this is your mother's duty. She's bound to it by every law of marriage--by every impulse of humanity.'

'You do not know my mother, sir,' said Alison, quietly; 'God forgive me for these unnatural words against her that bore me. But my mother has her health, and is, besides, of an impatient nature, and cannot understand that others should be sick and feeble.... I'll say no more.'

They went together to the far end of the low, long room, which was now getting dark.

'But this is monstrous!' said Herries, vehemently, 'a second sacrifice--I repeat it! You sacrificed me once to Nancy--and now you would sacrifice me to another. You cannot love me!'

'I love you,' said Alison, intently, 'I love you better than all the world--better than my poor father. But, or ever I saw your face, Archie, I knew his, and he has been a good father to me. God would surely desert me if, knowing what I do of things at home, I were to leave him in his helplessness. Archie, you'll not bring me to tempt God's anger?' It was almost a cry, but Herries would not hear the justice in it.

'Then I go,' he said, sore and angry, 'I go, uncomforted and alone.' But Alison clung to him with a sob.

'Oh, no--no--no!' she whispered, 'don't leave me, Archie--oh, not yet! I've been so long alone--so long--and never a sight of your face, and sometimes I would be nearly mad to think I might forget it. But no--I have remembered every line.'

Herries held his breath, and in the poignant sacredness of the moment his heart stood still. For never had Alison's arms held him as they did just now, or her eyes read his face; and he felt that woman's passion, unashamed, had taken the place of a girl's timid love. Her fingers touched his hair, and yet, somehow, with all its passion, it was a touch that might have been his mother's.

'You're gotten so grey, Archie,' she said, with a little tender laugh. 'You'll scarcely need the powder now!'

But Herries put her from him, almost roughly, with an oath.

'I can't bear it, Ally,' he said. 'If I must go, let me go now. I must have all or nothing.'

He took his riding-whip from the table where he had laid it, and turned and went without a word.

*CHAPTER XLVIII.*

That night did a stranger cause much commotion in the streets of C----by rampaging (as the inhabitants expressed it) up and down, demanding at every turn the surgeon who waited upon Mr. Graham of The Mains. It was Herries who pursued this curious quest, and the placid citizens judged him demented, as, indeed, but a few hours since, he would have judged himself. He traced the personage whom he sought to his own dwelling, where he found him, resting after the labours of the day, over a comfortable and steaming glass of toddy. Herries entered the room, booted and spurred as he was, and rang a guinea on the doctor's table with much the air of holding a pistol to his ear.

'I am given to understand,' said he, 'that you attend the laird of The Mains. Oblige me by telling me in confidence how long, in your opinion, it is probable that Mr. Graham has to live?' The astonished AEsculapius looked up, open-mouthed, shoving his spectacles from his nose to his bald forehead.

'God bless me!' he exclaimed. 'And who are you that put this most extraordinary question? It is outrageous!'

'I have paid good money for your opinion, like any other man--and should get it, I presume,' said Herries, sulkily.

'Not at all, not at all, sir!' said the doctor, swelling with professional offence. 'I never heard of such bold impudence!' He was, in the meantime, looking Herries up and down, and perceiving a gentlemanly man, well dressed and with a pale, grave face, made up his mind that he was neither a man in liquor nor a madman, but some person of consideration.

'If,' he said at last, 'you will give me satisfactory reasons for your extraordinary question, I may see whether I can answer it with decorum and with due attention to professional etiquette. I am too old a bird not to know that there are often good reasons for the strangest actions.' Herries was silent. He had intended no confidences; an impulse, very unlike him, had driven him to this crude method of trying to find out how long a time, Laban-like, he must yet serve for Alison. There was something kindly in the old doctor's weather-worn, sagacious countenance.

'I have a reason,' Herries said, suddenly determined to be frank. 'I am a suitor for the hand of Miss Graham, and she will not marry in her father's lifetime.'

'Oh--ho! sets the wind in that airt?' said the doctor, much more genially. 'Come, sit down, man, and let us talk it over. And so you are a friend of Miss Alison's? So am I--in troth, her earliest! And she will not leave her father for you? Well, I daresay not, I daresay not--a good lass! But the mother, let me tell you, stands in your gait fully more than the laird. She'll not do wanting Alison, and so she tells the world. A tremendous woman, sir, and set on her own ways. You'll not get Alison from her.'

'I'll take her!' said Herries, with a short laugh.

'A bold man!' said the doctor. 'Well, rather you than me to meddle with the mistress of The Mains! As to the laird, it goes against the grain with me to give his death-warrant. Many's the bottle I've cracked with him, honest man, sitting in the parlour at The Mains yonder--the mistress brought to bed upstairs--and waiting for they lasses of his to come into the world. But we must all die!' He paused, and then went on gravely, 'I cannot tell you how long you may have to wait. It might be a month, it might be a year, it might be ten. Some, in paralysis, die soon. Some linger in a death in life like his for half a lifetime. The Graham stock is tough, uncommonly so; but my old friend is in a bad case--the Lord send him rest!--and I do not think he'll live the year.' The speaker eyed Herries curiously. 'Does that content you?' he asked, with a twinkling eye.

'God forgive me for a cold-blooded questioner in this!' said Herries, really vexed and sorely ashamed. 'But I am clean distraught, I think! This young lady and I were contracted eight years since, but mischief came between us and we parted. And now we meet only to part again, this feeble life of a man almost dead between us. Am I excused in your eyes, sir?'

'Oh, I think so, I think so!' said the good-natured man of medicine with his husky laugh. 'But I'll not tell on you ('twould hardly do, you know) in after days!' He fetched another tumbler from his cupboard and would have Herries taste with him before he went. And so the aristocratic and reserved lawyer of George Street found himself sitting in the stuffy parlour of an unknown country doctor, with a singular tumult in his blood, a new and tender anticipation at his heart, drinking to happier days.

The laird of The Mains, however, falsified the prediction of his medical attendant and lingered for nearly two years, then dying in his chair. He was gathered to his fathers in the family vault, and friends and neighbours, gathered to his funeral, noted one stranger sharing in his obsequies--a stranger to all but Alison and the old doctor. The same man, in the dusk of the evening, spoke with Alison at the little gate under the lime tree--Alison, tall and pale and sad, in a black gown. It was no moment to speak of love, but, nevertheless, these two did then, in an enforced secrecy, arrange their future. A second time would Alison leave her home, and leave it in secret. For Mrs. Graham was set upon a perverse and obstinate opposition to any marriage for her last remaining daughter, rightly estimating the loss, to her, as one of a superior and most hard-working servant. Alison, who had battled so long, had no more strength and no more courage for the fight. In a month she and Archibald Herries fled to Edinburgh town, and were married by license.

That it was a merry wedding, you are not asked to believe. For, firstly, it took place almost in the shadow of death; and then, happiness that comes after long tarrying, comes--but comes timidly--like a flower that blows too late and trembles for the storm. Yet, in the spring after, the same plant will throw out vigorous and fearless shoots. And so it was, I feel sure, with Alison and Archibald Herries. They were happy in their marriage; children were born to them in the fine George Street house, and there were gay summer migrations to the Galloway home, and all the due symbols of a rational and well-deserved prosperity. I think that to the last they were on calling--if not cordial--terms, with Clarinda, and that Willy Maclehose, grown a fine young man, was a frequent visitor at their house.

But these things are all past and gone now. Alison's children are dust, and their children, I daresay, are preparing in turn for the inevitable abdication. For so the world wags, and we live and die, and Nature renews, for each one of us, the slowly-moving pageant of joy and sorrow, of passion and of pain. But it is the RHYMER, of whatsoever generation he may be, singing of these things for us so that we all understand, who is the only Immortal.

_*BURNS TO CLARINDA*_

_'Ae fond kiss and then we sever,_ _Ae fareweel and then forever!_ _Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,_ _Warring sighs and groans, I'll wage thee._ _Who shall say that fortune grieves him_ _While the star of hope she leaves him?_ _Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me,_ _Dark despair around benights me._

_'I'll ne'er blame my partial fancy,_ _Naething could resist my Nancy;_ _But to see her was to love her;_ _Love but her and love forever._ _Had we never loved sae kindly,_ _Had we never loved sae blindly,_ _Never met or never parted,_ _We had ne'er been broken-hearted._

_'Fare thee well, thou first and fairest!_ _Fare thee well, thou best and dearest!_ _Thine be ilka joy and treasure,_ _Peace, contentment, love and pleasure._ _Ae fond kiss and then we sever;_ _'Ae fareweel, alas! forever._ _Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee,_ _Warring sighs and groans I'll wage thee.'_