Part 7

Herries stood on the hearth, looking down at his cousin with his cool, critical, half-satirical regard. Her little innocent arts, so infallible, as a rule, in the conquest of his sex, her languishing glance, her merry smile, had no more effect upon him than summer breezes on the bastions of a fort. He called her in his thoughts, 'a little baggage,' teasing as a midge, perhaps, but hardly more important in the general scheme of things. That the 'little baggage' might have passions, strong to move her, and strong to move the little world around her--strong enough, perhaps, to turn aside the deep and placid current of his own existence--was a thought that never crossed his brain. Nancy, in the meantime, appreciated perfectly his attitude towards her, and it inspired her with a kind of petulance--the petulance of a charming woman at fault with a man, for once. Yet she always tried 'to be pretty with Herries,' as she phrased it. It was her nature, and her weakness, to be 'pretty' with everyone.

Alison, at this juncture, had left the cousins alone, taking Danny to his bed, for the child drooped with fatigue, in spite of his eagerness to sit up late. Herries watched her departure.

'I don't quite gather who she is, and where she comes from, your very--your very ample young friend?' he enquired, lazily.

'My friend is Miss Graham of The Mains,' said Nancy, with some tartness.

'Oh, I know that much,' said Herries. 'But how she comes to be your friend, and to be here, gives food for enquiry. I've hitherto not seen that misses from the country were much to your taste.'

'She has a little history, Archie,' said Nancy, covering her stony relative (quite unavailingly) with one of her softest glances--'a little history that might melt even your hard heart.'

'Let us hear it, and perhaps I'll melt,' said Herries, drily.

'I found the child in a dreary, God-forsaken hole of a country place,' Nancy began, in narrative style, 'one of a prodigious family--seven girls--think of it! And they were going to marry her, against her every wish and instinct, to a man old enough to be her father. And so I acted Providence and bore her off, in spite of them, and here she is.'

'Good God, cousin!' said Herries, with a lift of his eyebrows that Nancy particularly disliked; 'you mean to say you took the girl from her parents--interfered with their projects for her future--and now burden yourself with the responsibility of her maintenance? Heavens!'

'Her own father helped me--at the end,' said Nancy, pouting. 'He was a decent man, and thankful to be off the devilish bargain of selling his daughter to an old horror. Yes, I call it devilish--hellish--if you prefer the word!'

'Oh, Lord!' said Herries, as though words failed him. 'And who, pray, was the bridegroom you have helped to cheat?'

'Old Cheape--you know him--Cheape of Kincarley,' said Nancy.

'A most respectable person, and excellent parti!' exclaimed Herries, now in his most provoking mood. 'Why, a warm man is old Cheape, with as cosy a bit of property in the east neuk of Fife as there is in broad Scotland. And you have cheated Miss Graham out of this fine setting-down! What better could she have hoped for, in her situation? Upon my soul, but you have done the poor girl a bad turn. And how do you mean to make up for it?'

It was no soft glance with which Nancy now eyed her exasperating relative; her eyes flashed, and her little fingers literally tingled to box his ears.

'Archie,' she said, with a little toss, 'I think 'tis time you were back among your law books and your papers, for you can't breathe, I think, in a kindlier atmosphere.' Herries laughed, not ill-humouredly, however, for there was real mirth in the twinkle of his eyes.

'I'll be gone, dear cousin,' he said. 'I'd present my condolences to Miss Graham, but she's vanished. Poor young lady, I protest I grieve for her. Well, good-night, Nancy. We will converse on business another time--your packet is on yonder table, by the fire.' He took his departure, still smiling--that provoking smile of his, with the eyebrows raised.

'I'm d----d if it's altogether a laughing matter, though'--he said to himself as he went down the stair. 'For is Nancy--or am I, rather, for it comes to that--to feed, clothe and fend for that prodigious miss up yonder? 'Tis a mighty practical question, and no joke.' It was a question--a rather delicate one, perhaps,--which only time could answer, which it did, in all due course, and with the greatest plainness.

In the room which the young lawyer had left, and to which Alison had returned, the candles flared down in their sockets, and the fire burned low, but still its two occupants remained there, deep in talk. Or rather, one talked, and the other listened; for it was Nancy who poured forth all the pent-up raptures of her first interview with the poet, while Alison sympathised--struggling, it must be confessed, with a certain feeling of sleepiness the while. For it was no doubt because Nancy tried to describe precisely that which is indescribable--the nameless fascination of genius--the overpowering magnetism of an unique personality--that she failed, on this occasion, completely to convince her usually pliant listener.

'I am afraid,' said Alison, presently, with a pensive air, 'that your cousin, Mr. Herries, does not think that Mr. Burns is quite a--quite a good man.'

'Herries!' exclaimed Nancy, indignantly, 'you heard him! And pray, did you ever hear anything so intolerant--so insufferably unjust, in your life? Because, forsooth, a man is not cut precisely after his own pattern--cold, bloodless, passionless, like himself--Herries condemns him! He will make no allowance for a nature different to his own--subject to temptations which never assail him, and the sport of circumstances whose difficulty he has no idea of. Herries, indeed! Ally, if life were as Herries would make it, 'twould be a desert, and I'd die of thirst. But, Heaven be thanked, though I depend upon him in a measure, and must therefore obey him in many outward things, he cannot bind my soul! That is free--to take its own flights--to seek its own companion in a kindred spirit, which understands it, and whom it understands.'

Sleepy Alison did not pause to enquire whether this was merely a poetical generalisation, or whether the 'kindred spirit' were Mr. Burns. She looked gently and patiently--a little wonderingly, perhaps, at the fretted, passion-tossed little creature at her side.

'Come to bed, Nancy,' she whispered persuasively, as to an excited child. ''Tis so late, dear--long, long past one of the clock.'

'To bed!' exclaimed Nancy. 'And who could sleep, after such an evening as I have spent? But, of course, I'll come, love. 'Tis a world of prose, and one must eat and sleep, as though poesy were not. But, Ally'--she crept close to the girl, and whispered at her ear with flushed face, and brightening eyes--'Ally, he is coming here!'

'Who?' said Alison, a little startled. 'The--the poet?'

'Ay, child,' said Nancy, 'the bard. He's to honour my poor hovel with his presence. Think of it! And you will see him, Ally--ay--and hear him. For don't suppose that I forgot my Ally in my raptures. I said to him, "I have a song-bird, sir, up in my eyrie, whose wood-note wild will delight you." You remember how I told you, Ally, he delights in a voice to sing over to him the old country airs and catches, and this he told me himself to-night. So you must be in song, sweetest--when he comes, in a day or two--and we will tune the old harp, and have a heavenly evening with the Muses.'

This, surely, was a prospect to delight any girl, and fill her brain with dreams. But Alison, as she went to bed that night (prosaic girl--I grieve to state it of a heroine), never thought of the honour in store for her. In the first place, she was sleepy, and in the second--well, in the second, her thoughts seemed inclined to stay elsewhere. There flickered before her eyes--it would come--the most teasing, tantalising little picture--the cameo-like outline of a profile, virile though delicate--and oh, so dreadfully severe; the steely penetration of cold, cold blue eyes; the lines of a figure that held Danny on its knee, and had Willy leaning heavily against its shoulder. And the following, or something like it, was Miss Graham's last waking thought that night.

'I've heard Nancy call him "little," but he's as big as me, and I' (with a deep sigh) 'am so much, much too big for a woman.... If I were as wee as Nancy, I'd call him ... tall.'

*CHAPTER XVI.*

The figure of Robert Burns at all the Edinburgh parties of the winters of 1786-1787 is as classical among the classical portraits of literary history as that of Byron at Ravenna, or Shelley at Geneva, or Scott among the woods of Abbotsford. It is the imposing and yet pathetic spectacle of a Titan in a chain of flowers. For here was a man, a peasant pure and simple, taken from the plough, to be the pet for a while of fine ladies in genteel drawing-rooms, and the plaything of men, who, though they were pigmies beside him, yet covered him with an easy condescension, and held him as the object of a gracious, if fitful, patronage. Burns had borne the ordeal of his sudden popularity with wonderful steadfastness of mind. The natural shrewdness of the Scottish peasant was combined in him with the splenetic melancholy of the poetical temperament; and the combination aided him to a singularly just view of his position and its dangers. He was never over-sanguine; he suspected that his course, like that of other meteors, would be brief, if brilliant; and, so far as it lay within the bounds of Edinburgh society, so it proved. That society--that brilliant little world of fashion, intellect and power--has been held to account for its treatment of the peasant-poet, whom it _feted_ for a season, and then dropped. It had hailed him with acclamation because he was a peasant--the more wonderful a genius for being so--and then, because he was a peasant, it held him at arm's length. It was no more than he himself had foretold, though in foretelling it he had hardly realised the embittering effects upon his proud and sensitive temper. It was a great and cruel injustice--the thoughtless inconsistency of a selfish world--but, under the circumstances, it was inevitable and almost natural. It seems certainly to have been the fact that, by the time his first season in the capital was over, the attitude of two-thirds of its society towards the poet was, like that of Herries, one of a growing repulsion.

It was at this juncture, at the beginning of his second season, that Burns met Mrs. Maclehose in the drawing-room of Miss Nimmo. All the little world gathered at that party had smiled at the result; but it was a smile entirely devoid of malice. No one knew, or even thought, any harm of the charming little grass-widow--victim of a heartless desertion--who lived so simply and so blamelessly with her two young children in her garret in the Potterrow, under the strict guardianship of that most respected and rising young man, her cousin, Archibald Herries. Her weakness for the Muses was well known, and her passion to be made acquainted with the poet of the hour had long been a jest. While, as to Burns, there was no question at all what his opinion would be of a pretty and charming young woman of lively parts, who was ready to fall down and worship him. So, when the two came together, and sat the whole evening side by side upon a sofa, engaged in a conversation so absorbing, that they had neither eyes nor ears for the rest of the world--everyone nodded and laughed and let them alone.

Burns at this time had come to Edinburgh on business connected with the publication of his works. He was lodged in a couple of rooms in St. James's Square in the New Town, and kept, on the whole, but doubtful company. Fine friends, as already hinted, were growing cold, and fine ladies, in high places, fastidious. In the lesser intellectual circles--as at Miss Nimmo's--he was still welcome. But it was not a happy or prosperous period in his life. Money matters worried, and conscience pricked. A summer's dalliance in his native place had reduced his much-enduring Jean Armour to a condition which resulted in that meek woman's ignominious expulsion, for a second time, from her father's house. Other matters, also of a tender and delicate nature, were giving trouble. From a poet's love affairs it is seldom discreet to lift the veil. It can only be said that their frequency never seems to negative their fervour, while they last. Burns had a capacious heart, which could furnish shrines for several idols at one time; a complex nature where, as ever, the Soul and the Satyr strove for unequal mastery. It may be imagined how delightful to such a temperament was the balm of Mrs. Maclehose's generous adulation. The poet was precisely in that condition when a man desires to be soothed, to be flattered, to be made to forget his own shortcomings and the world's cruelty. And who so clever to keep him in such a mood as the fascinating little grass-widow of the Potterrow? So their spirits rushed together, and they swore an eternal friendship on the spot. In a couple of days, it was arranged, the poet should come and take a dish of tea with Mrs. Maclehose at her house, and that lady was in the seventh heaven. But, to quote the bard himself,--

'The best laid plans o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley'--

and the tea-drinking, at that early date, never took place. Either on the way home from Miss Nimmo's, or on some errand the following day, the poet was knocked down in the street by a coach, and thus, instead of hastening to the Potterrow on the wings of an exalted friendship, he found himself crippled and confined to his lodging in St. James's Square with a broken knee-pan and a highly-irritated temper. In the Potterrow the news of this untimely accident came as a crushing disappointment. Nancy cried like a child, and Alison, who had not shed such tears herself since she was seven years of age, strove to comfort her with every device of words and every promise of future compensation that she could think of.

'He'll come yet--of course he will, Nancy,' she said cheerfully; 'and then, you know, he'll write.'

Alas! easy words! Had poor Alison but foreseen with what a fatal facility he would, and did, write: with what awful and voluminous avidity they both would fall upon pens, ink and paper, she would not have spoken so lightly. Could she but have had a vision of that weary sequence of thick letters, that only too often her own faithful though unwilling hands would have to carry, she would not have been so delighted when the first one was written and the first received. Nancy, in a fever of thwarted eagerness, had at first threatened to rush off to visit the bard in his confinement.

'I must see him!' she cried, stamping her little foot. 'I shall, and will! What's to prevent me? Am I not a wife and mother? Are we not all relatives--sons and daughters of Adam? Why should a censorious world put difficulties in the way of my visiting my poor friend? I'll not be bound by these ridiculous conventionalities!' But Alison's sound natural sense averted the threatened indiscretion.

''Twould embarrass the poor man to receive you, Nancy,' she sensibly said. 'You know you have told me yourself how low is his station in the world, and 'tis little likely he has a room fit to see ladies in, and it would hurt his pride that you should find that out. And then--and then, your cousin, Mr. Herries, who does not favour--'

'Drat my cousin!' said Nancy, petulantly, 'and you to quote him, as solemn as the owl himself! But 'tis true--God's truth, indeed--I daren't offend him. And most consumedly it would offend his highness--such a visit on my part--if it got to his ears. No, you are right, Ally--wise, Ally! I see it. I'll abandon this visit, though 'twould but be one of kindness and mercy. I'll take me to my pen. Thank Heaven for the pen, Ally, that permits no real separation--no severing of souls--between friend and friend!'

The Pen! Little, busy, inky devil, that, when the tongue would stammer and the lips be stiff, blabs out the inmost secrets of the heart! Betrayer and tell-tale, with a treachery that is worse than tongues, because indelible! Specious ally, who turns king's evidence, and becomes the most relentless witness to our follies! Pin's point, now steeped in honey and now dipped in gall, oh, power of hurt, far deadlier than the honest sword, this pricking Pen! Sensible Alison, when, long, long years after this, she came to hold in her hand certain letters, yellowed and faded with age, and to read, marvelling greatly, their turbulent, passionate pages, thought this, and more, of the dangerous doings of the quill; although, to be sure, she never expressed herself in the language of hyperbole. That was not her way.

When, however, the first two or three of these letters were written, and their answers received, in those gay early days in the Potterrow, Alison was delighted, because they made her friend so happy.

'We are to make it a regular thing,' Nancy explained, 'and who knows, Ally, but that it may become one of the classic correspondences in our language? We are to have borrowed names chosen by him. How I love this fancy of Arcadian names in such a commerce; it gives the last delightful touch of romance. He is to be "Sylvander," and I "Clarinda." Now is not "Clarinda" a pretty name, Ally? Heard you ever a sweeter or a more musical?'

''Tis very pretty, indeed,' said Alison, good-naturedly. Secretly she thought it an outlandish appellation. 'I think "Nancy's" quite as pretty,' she added, truthfully; 'though, to be sure, a stranger could not call you so at once.'

'Why, that's just it!' cried Nancy. 'Don't you see how we avoid vulgar familiarity on one hand, and chilling formality on the other? 'Tis the most perfect idea. I am in love with it, Ally!'

Alison smiled benignly on her little friend, quite unaware that the cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, had appeared on their horizon, the cloud that would some day cover the sky.

*CHAPTER XVII.*

One day, about this time, our heroine received a great surprise, not to say a violent shock, in a letter from her father. She came running in with it to Nancy, who had not risen, with a very white face.

'Lud, child!' cried her friend, looking up from the composition of a morning poem, 'what is it?'

'My sister Kate is to have Mr. Cheape!' gasped Alison. Nancy burst out laughing.

'Well, love,' she said, 'what did I tell you? And why pull such a long lugubrious face over it? Could any arrangement more altogether natural be imagined? There is another of you disposed of, your mother pleased, and Mr. Cheape fitted with a wife at last.'

'Oh, how could she do it?' wailed Alison, alluding to her less-fastidious sister. 'Kate, too, the bonniest of us all!'

'Well, dear, she gets the wedding silk and a man with it,' said Nancy. 'I'll be bound she is quite content.'

But Alison, not so easily consoled, wept over the horrid fate of her sister. Her father, otherwise, wrote cheerfully. The impending wedding had restored good humour to his consort, and he expressed a belief that Alison, if she had a mind to, might now return home, and all would be forgotten and forgiven. The laird, however, proceeded to counsel his daughter to remain where she was for the present, and 'get all the good she could for her coach-hire to the town,' as he expressed it, after the matter-of-fact manner of The Mains.

'Sure, Ally, you'd never think of leaving me?' said Nancy in sincere alarm, and with imploring eyes.

'Indeed, I've no wish to,' said Alison.

'For, you know,' went on the little woman, clinging to Alison's hand, which she fondled as she spoke, 'I get to lean on you, Ally, day by day, and more and more. You're so big, and strong, and steady, not a poor little straw like me, blown about by every wind.'

Alison looked a little doubtful. 'I'm big and strong, I know,' she said pensively, 'but I doubt 'tis more in the body than in the mind, Nancy. I'm like a child in leading-strings, I sometimes think. 'Twas our mother kept us all so, I suppose, being herself strong-willed.'

'Well, to be sure,' said Nancy, with a laugh, 'you'd have married Mr. Cheape if it hadn't been for me.

'Yes, I believe I should,' said Alison, slowly. 'It seemed best for everybody. I'd never have had the power alone, to break with it. So, you see, I doubt my own strength, Nancy, when I'm put to it.'

Possibly Alison's straight mind was already puzzling itself over the problem of that Platonic correspondence which had now become such a part of life in the Potterrow--bringing a feverish element into it. Letters came and letters went every day. Sometimes they were entrusted to the 'caddies,' or town's messengers, but these proved a disagreeable class to deal with. Scenting an intrigue, they were extortionate, and Nancy's slender purse could endure no such constant drain. So it came about that Alison, only too naturally and too often, became friendship's messenger, and very heartily did she grow to dislike the walk between the Potterrow and the poet's lodging. St. James's Square, now little better than a 'slum,' was even in those days an unattractive locality. Unlike the rest of the New Town, it was meanly built, and had a squalid air, its denizens being not among the most respectable or desirable of the city. Disagreeable and meaning glances would be cast at the tall young lady, still very countrified in her air and dress, who hurried along, either alone, or only with a little boy for company. Then, at the dingy house where the poet lodged, the door would be opened either by a rough-looking man, with a very insolent and disagreeable manner (it was, indeed, none other than the poet's precious friend and crony, Nicol), or by a slatternly woman, with a sly glance, greedy for a bribe. The bribe, alas! at Nancy's instigation, was given by Alison's innocent and shrinking hand. How could she help it? This element of secrecy--of the underhand--in the affair vexed her to the soul. She did not doubt that the correspondence in itself was perfectly innocent. Nancy gave her to understand it was the most high-souled, the most improving, the most inspiring correspondence that ever was carried on. It treated almost exclusively of religion and the Muses, and it was to be the means of bringing the poet to better ways of thinking--especially on the former important subject. Yet, Nancy said, this was a censorious world; it would at once wickedly misunderstand a correspondence between a married woman, in her delicate position, and a man of the poet's character and condition. Therefore, it must be kept quiet--most especially from Herries, with his distorted views and unjust judgments, must it be kept a secret. Alison sighed, but she loved and trusted her little friend, and acquiesced.

Nor, at this time, must it be supposed that Alison's life was all a running of messages, or even a willing drudgery for Nancy's little boys, which she herself would gladly have made it. Far too kind-hearted was the little mistress of the Potterrow to permit of this. She desired above all things that her young friend should be seen and admired, and one fine morning she had suddenly said,--

'And now, Ally, we must see to your clothes, love! Look, the sun shines! We'll e'en away to Madam Cantrip's this very minute, and see the fashions.'

'But,' cried Alison, aghast, 'I've no money to buy new clothes, Nancy!'

Nancy simply pinched her cheek and laughed, ever so sunnily and gaily.