Chapter VI: Part 6

'So homely looks are no safeguard after all, Lizzie?' said Herries, when he had been enlightened. 'And all your trouble in choosing a discreet helpmate was thrown away!' He could not help tormenting his dependent, whose temper afforded him amusement at times, as well as inconvenience. 'How and when did you get rid of the girl?' he enquired.

'Rid o' her--the dirty besom!' said Lizzie, reverting to the idiom of the fray. 'I put her to the door, and to the street--and her skirling like a scraggit hen! I'se warrant ye, I got rid o' her!'

'Well, I hope you gave her her wages up to date,' said Herries, turning away, 'and did not put the poor wretch penniless on the pavement, in her condition, and in this weather.'

'Oo, she had siller, I'm thinking,' said the old woman, with a sly look; 'there was a croon i' the pocket o' her--and ane no' honestly come by, neither.'

'Bless me!' said Herries, 'you paint your relative very black, Lizzie! Did she steal the crown?'

'Na,' said Lizzie, with unpleasant meaning in her tone; she had a tongue that would always hurt someone, if it could,--'she got given the croon right enough! 'Twas frae that braw leddy i' the red coat ye had to her tea here; she wad hae Mysie haud her tongue aboot some cantrip o' her ane, up the toon there, leaving a letter, or sic-like trash; but Mysie, ye ken, was simple, and aye blabbed everything she saw. O, they're a' the same, gentle and simple,' added Lizzie, who hated her own sex with inexplicable malice.

'You may go,' said Herries, curtly. He felt as though he had got a slap across the face--and from a dirty hand.

Pressure of work at first allowed him no time for unprofitable musing. He had to go down to his partner's room on business. The office, as usual, was heated to suffocation, and he found Creighton--a most singular state of things--half asleep, or rather in a condition of a sort of semi-torpor, crouching over the fire. He, however, roused himself, and attended to the business in hand with almost his usual perspicacity. But Herries perceived that his energy was but a spurt; it flagged almost instantly.

'You don't look well, sir,' he said to the elder man.

'I am not well, Herries,' Creighton answered heavily, but he said no more, for his breath seemed to catch.

'I must beg of you to excuse my further attendance to-day,' he gasped out. 'I must--I must go out into the air. I burn--my chest seems weighted. The fresh air would relieve me.'

'It is very cold, sir,' said Herries, alarmed by his partner's symptoms. 'Let me come with you.'

'Will you?' said Creighton, wistfully. Herries helped the old man--he seemed suddenly to have become a very old man--into his great-coat. He hardly believed him fit to walk, but the going out seemed to relieve him, as he expected. He drew one or two deep breaths of the icy air, and then walked on, though with a feeble step.

'Take my arm,' said Herries, kindly. 'We'll have a turn in the sun, below the castle.'

They proceeded for some way in silence. One subject tormented Herries's thoughts; he was impelled--unlike himself, somehow--to give it utterance.

'I was right, and you wrong, about a trifle, the other night, Creighton,' he said. 'A young lady of our acquaintance, who refused my escort up the town, did so because she had something to hide.'

'Who told you?' asked Creighton, sharply.

'Lizzie,' said Herries. 'The lass Mysie told tales when she got home. She was heavily fee'd to hold her tongue about some letter secretly left.'

'And you tell me,' exclaimed Creighton, with unexpected energy, 'that you listen to the gossip of servants on such a subject! Fie, for shame, sir! Besides, are you the Grand Turk, or a Catholic Inquisitor, that a girl may not leave a letter on a friend? Just as likely it was not her own letter, but your cousin's; and as to the feeing, why, 'twas the New Year time, and she would have to fee the lass for her trouble.'

'A crown is a heavy fee from a girl's slender purse to a scullion,' said Herries, moodily. 'I have an inkling,' he went on, frowning, 'where the letter was left--St. James's Square, I dare be sworn! We know who lodges there, and the women can no more keep off him than flies from honey.'

'Bless me!' said Creighton. 'Are you blaming our poor Rob? Nay, sir, but what a strange, far-fetched idea. I had hardly realised the Bard was known to your cousin, though I think you told me they met some weeks ago.'

'By this time, I daresay, he frequents my cousin's house,' said Herries, quietly, 'for that's his way in such matters. A scoundrel in manners,' went on the young lawyer, angrily; 'the seducer of women--I know him! I'd sooner trust the lamb with the wolf, than a young, inexperienced girl with such a man. The glamour of his genius hides the corruption of his mind. The thought of that danger is sickening.'

'Wheesht, wheest!' said Creighton. 'I don't gainsay that he is warm--too warm, poor Rob! But believe me, sir, 'tis not the young and noble and innocent--like our fair friend who shall be nameless--that such a man seeks. 'Tis the more experienced women--ripe for dalliance--versed in such ardours--'

'Oh, you think of my cousin,' said Herries, coolly. 'But she dare not try these tricks; she understands too well the delicacy and instability of her present situation, she knows to a hair's-breadth what she can, and what she cannot, risk. I can trust Nancy with herself, but with--with a charge I cannot trust her. She's no fit guide for a young girl.'

'Oh, be at rest, sir, be at rest!' said Creighton, smiling. 'She that we talk of needs no guidance from your cousin. If there is guiding to be done, her own will be the hand that guides; and whomsoever she guides she will guide to a blessing. Take my word for that; I have looked her through and through.... And now that we talk of angels, we begin to hear their wings, I perceive.'

Herries looked up, and saw in the distance Alison and the child Willy coming towards them.

'They--they sometimes walk here of a morning,' he said.

'Ah, you knew that!' cried Creighton, well pleased.

'It may be that I did,' said Herries.

His partner's words had poured balm upon his irritation. There was a calmness and a strength about Creighton's common sense, that made it very convincing. He could certainly influence Herries to a degree that was possible with no one else. And now Alison herself was coming, and the young man felt a sudden and uncontrollable tumult in his blood. She passed them at the full distance of the broad walk, and only bowed, but it was near enough for them to see the sudden colour in her half-averted face, to note the quickened step and fluttered air. Creighton slipped his arm from that of his friend.

'Run, man, run!' he said; 'you are due elsewhere. Don't you see the signals held out for your welcome?'

'I--I see them,' stammered Herries, himself red as a boy. 'But you, sir? Can you get home?'

'What matters an old man like me?' cried Creighton, impatiently. 'My race is run. Be off--be off! She'll give you the slip yet; she's nearly out of sight.'

Herries hesitated a moment; his cold eyes were alight as they looked after the vanishing figure in the red pelisse.

'I'll take your advice, sir,' he said. And then he followed.

Creighton toiled up the steep ascent to his lodgings alone.

'All's well--for this time!' he was saying to himself. 'But how will it be when I am not at his elbow to allay suspicion, to soothe pride? They're ingrained in the nature of the lad. Will they lose him his happiness as they did me mine? It's likely--it's likely yet, if I know men.' He had barely breath to get up the long stone stair to his rooms, and cast himself into a chair beside the neglected hearth. He looked round the room with dull apathy of sickness, and wiped the sheer sweat from his forehead with a shaking hand.

'She--she shall have all I have to leave in this world,' he muttered. 'For the lad's sake, and for the sake of one of her sex--dead this thirty years. And for her own sake, too--a fine, a fair creature, a bonny lass!' He made as though he would reach a desk that stood near upon a table, but fell back weakly in his chair.

'Time enough yet for that, I daresay,' he said, closing his eyes.

There is often 'time enough' for the making of those wills, and yet the future finds them--unmade.

*CHAPTER XXVIII.*

Down in the fields, near where, nowadays, Ainslie and Moray Places rear their respectable family mansions--fields white that morning with the thick, wintry rime--Archibald Herries and Alison Graham walked side by side. He was bareheaded in the cold, for assuredly a man does not talk easily of love with his hat on his head. He held it in a hand behind him; the other arm had Alison's hand between it and his heart. This girl was his. Had he needed to ask? There are some things craved and received without question and answer. Suspicion and mistrust seemed to have vanished away; no man could harbour either while he looked in Alison's eyes.

'Whom shall we tell first, Ally?' he was asking.

'Need we tell anyone, sir--just yet?' said Alison, wistfully. 'Isn't it too new and too--too good to be told?'

The words were too strictly an echo from his own nature for him to find fault with them.

'But my cousin might have to be told,' he suggested.

'Nancy? Oh, no, no!' said Alison, impulsively.

'Why?' said Herries, laughing. 'I thought you were such dear friends, and had no secrets from each other?'

'So we are--dear friends, sir,' said Alison, though not quite with the enthusiasm she might have felt a month ago. 'But--I could not tell her of this. 'Tis different to everything else in the world.'

'That's true,' Herries answered. 'Ally,' he said, suddenly, 'are you prepared to find me but a poor lover? For 'tis that I'm likely to prove, I fear. I am but a dry stick. Pretty speeches come so shyly to my lips, and as to love-letters, I never put pen to paper but in the way of business. Weeks might pass and I might never say, "I love you."'

'Sure,' said Alison slowly, as though she were thinking out some abstruse and difficult problem, 'sure, 'tis the people that love each other most that never do say "I love you." All my life long I've loved my father and my sisters and little Jacky when he came, but I never thought to say "I love you" to one of them. If you know a thing in your heart, the less need to have it on your lips. Don't you think so, sir?'

'True, very true, Ally,' said Herries, thinking to himself what a pearl of sweet sense he had found, and how she suited him; 'only--only--'

'Only what?' asked Alison, innocently.

'Only I would it were the General's Entry, dear,' whispered Herries, at her ear, 'with walls and nothing but a dim old lamp....'

'Ah, but it's not, sir!' cried Alison, pulling away from him, scarlet with blushes; ''tis the open field, and there comes Willy!'

'Plague take the child--so he does!' said Herries.

He had given the boy a shilling to spend at a booth in the suburb, and it seemed to him hardly a shilling's-worth of absence that had been granted. Willy came racing towards them, vociferous, flying a newly-purchased kite above his head.

'So we must go, I suppose, sir?' said Alison, wistfully.

''Tis getting mighty cold, though we haven't noticed it,' Herries observed, as they walked townwards across the fields. 'I think I smell the snow.'

A thin, yellowish film had gathered over the bright sun, which, day after day, had made the long, strong frost endurable. The cold, indeed, became perceptibly greater, and a slight, shivering wind set in from the north.

'Haste you home, child,' said Herries, 'and be in before the storm. You may guess whether I come soon to the Potterrow or not.'

'N--not too often, sir,' whispered Alison. The whisper might have stood for the mere coyness of a girl, and so Herries translated it. But in Alison's mind was the troubled knowledge of how little welcome her lover was just now, in the little room which his own liberality helped to make so cosy and so home-like. It was very hard, she thought, but time would doubtless show a way out of the difficulty, if one were only patient.

Alison, indeed, was very grave as she walked home that day, after parting from her lover. She was very happy. Her feeling for Herries had become--as such feelings will with such natures--a part and parcel of herself--the very heart of her. It was a wondrous thing, a miracle, that the one man she had ever known should also be the one man in the world most worthy of love and honour. But then, to reverent and simple minds, the miracle brings awe as well as joy, and Alison was a little afraid of her own happiness, as though it could hardly be meant for such as she. Not for nothing was she the daughter of those bucolic, hard-lived ancestors of hers, who, generation after generation, in the dull obscurity of The Mains, had dragged through joyless and prosaic lives, ignorant of the world beyond the boundaries of their home. Something of a want of buoyancy was Alison's, and it came from that old home source. But she loved,--and the tingle of the new sensation ran through her veins like wine, though it left her sober.

Herries, in the meantime, reached his house in a mood of elation so very singular for him that, had he been like many of his countrymen of that day, superstitious, he would have called it 'fey'--uncanny. Everything seemed to be working together for his good; the stars in their courses fought his battles. Through the least likely source in the world--his cousin--he had found what promised to be the happiness of his life. Approval and passion--how seldom they combine!--met in his tenderness for Alison Graham. There might be other girls more beautiful and more accomplished, but surely there was no other in the world so formed to please him. How sensible she was! Would any other girl have condoned, nay, actually have proposed, a courtship so shorn of the nonsense which by long custom must needs beset all conventional affairs of the kind? Herries reflected, with easy complacency, how exceedingly well it suited him, at this juncture, that his betrothal should be kept a secret. Creighton, he was certain, was either ill, or about to be ill, and during his illness the affair of a new partnership would naturally be in a decent abeyance. The strain of double work and double anxiety must fall upon him, Herries, very severely in the immediate future, and how inexpressibly inconvenient, at such a time, would have been the fuss and the worry of a declared engagement. But there was to be no such foolish demand upon his time and energy, no nonsense of a daily correspondence, or lover-like dancing of attendance on his charmer. He was even bidden not to go too often to the Potterrow! How infinitely to his taste, how admirably suitable, it all was!

Yet, for a young man so perfectly pleased with a wise and sober arrangement of things, that evening in his rooms seemed to pass with extraordinary slowness,--in very truth, with the most appalling tedium. He was restless; he could neither write nor read. He spent the lonely hours lolling now in one chair, now in another, his handsome head thrown back, his eyes beset with dreams. What he dreamed of was a room, so much meaner than his own, a little room, ruddy with fire and candlelight and cosy curtains, where there was a grey-eyed girl, the tinkle of a harp, the notes of a song. He went furtively to a window and looked out, with a certain thought in the back of his mind. But the night was one of whirling snow, dark and wild, for the storm had come.

''Twould be madness to go; they'd think me crazy,' was the thought in his mind. A clock struck, and he laughed. 'Why, they'll be away to their beds!' he said. Certain strings, which appeared to be attached in the neighbourhood of his heart, were pulling him, pulling him to the Potterrow. But this time he withstood their wrenching, and taking a law book from the shelf, set himself to read like a really sensible man.

*CHAPTER XXIX.*

The lion and the jackal are figures coupled by the natural historian as a matter of course, so that one may presume that every lion has his jackal, to howl before him and to polish the bones which his lionship leaves behind. In human life the same phenomenon appears, and every lion, who is a lion worth mentioning, may have his satellite in a meaner kind of creature, to prepare the way before him and do his dirty work.

The poet Burns was well furnished with one of these necessary adjuncts to a lion's _suite_, in his friend Nicol, a personage who, after sundry vicissitudes in life, had managed to secure for himself the outwardly respectable post of a teacher in the High School. The chances of tavern life had brought the two together, and flattery, no doubt sincere if fulsome, on the one side, and on the other that necessity to be admired and followed which is the curse of the poetic temperament, sealed their friendship. Yet it is difficult to imagine how Burns, with whom men of a far higher stamp than Nicol, would still gladly have associated, could content himself with the society of one so palpably inferior to himself in all ways. Nicol was a coarse, blustering, unwashen brute, with a violent and jealous temper that the partial poet chose euphuistically to dub 'a confounded strong in-knee'd sort of a soul.' He had, on more than one occasion, ruined the Bard's chances of favour in high quarters, by his ill-bred intrusions and unmannered insolence. He was not a comfortable kind of jackal at all, and yet Burns stuck to him, actuated, no doubt, partly by the kind of sturdy loyalty of which he was capable towards the humble friends of his own sex, and partly by obstinacy. The man hindered him at every turn, but there was no doubting his devotion. And then, he was that kind of coarse instrument which a man is not afraid to use to the most doubtful ends. And the poet, it is likely, had uses only too many for such a tool.

Nicol, during these weeks of which we write, had been having a hard time of it. To be jackal to a lion-poet, with an injured knee-pan and inflamed passions, is no sinecure. Not for weeks had the unfortunate man had a moment to be called his own. When he was not carrying messages or delivering letters--waiting for answers, or receiving them at the door--he was listening to the anathemas of the afflicted poet, who, maddened by confinement, spent his time in cursing fate, and in the writing of those letters which he pestered his adherent, in season and out of season, to carry for him. The inclement weather which had now set in, added very much to Nicol's hardships. On a certain morning, with the snowdrifts piled high against the doors, he struggled forth to see his friend, but armed with a grim resolution that, on such a day, he would do no more.

He found the poet, with his injured leg upon a stool, scribbling for dear life. The dingy, ill-kept room was close, with a closeness strongly flavoured with last night's potations. The Bard, as he wrote to his Clarinda, was 'pretty hearty, after a bowl busily plyed last night from dinner-time to bed-time.' He folded and fastened this precious missive as Nicol entered.

'Eh, Nicol, man,' he began, cheerfully, 'you are just in good time to be Cupid's messenger once more. Here's the note ready.'

'I carry notes this day,' said Nicol, loudly and assertively, 'to no sluts whatsoever! 'Tis no day for a dog to be out, not to say a human being.'

'Hoots, man,' said the poet, fleechingly. 'What's a bit blaw o' snow? The storm's by wi'. Were it not for this d----d leg, which I did over exercise in the walking yesterday, I would be out and away mysel'.'

'Well, you can be out and away, leg and all,' said Nicol, unmoved, 'for ye'll no get me to do none o' your deil's trokes this day.'

'Man, Willie,' said the poet, with a seriously alarmed air, 'but the letter must go, ye ken that! She, my present charmer (sure you know it to your own cost as well as mine), has an epistolary aptitude that surpasses all. 'Tis the devil and all with these high-flown little dears.... Now, a simple lass will be content with words and kisses, and so a man whiles gets a moment's peace. But pen and ink must serve her betters. God wot, it is no easy job to fill a daily sheet! But gin she doesna get it, she'll have six here, and then you'll have to carry six answers instead of one.... You'll never fail me at this gait, surely?'

'Is it to that thrice-accursed stair up the town you'd have me go?' demanded Nicol, savagely. He hated, with some reason, every step of the steep way to the Potterrow. 'But I needna ask,' he continued. 'You're none so anxious wi' messages in the other quarter now....' The words conveyed a sting, and the poet flushed, with the sheepish air of a boy caught in some peccadillo.

'Wheesht! wheesht!' he said, uneasily. Nicol shrugged his shoulders; the countless and complicated amours of his friend wearied him excessively, for he heard of little else. Those of the lower kind he would condone; they served for a coarse jest now and again, and he would rally the poet--as others had often done--on the extraordinary unattractiveness of some of his humbler Dulcineas. But for the more ambitious intrigues, he had scant patience, and the vulgarian's restless jealousy of the class above him made him, on this score, especially intractable and suspicious.

'I would ye had the giving and taking yersel' o' your precious letters to your fine, flummery madams,' he said, ill-temperedly. 'Och, there's ane o' them I would I had a hand o'! The jad', she thinks an honest man the dirt beneath her feet, and rubs her fingers on her hanky--curse her airs!--if they chance to touch her hand.' The poet looked puzzled.

'Sure, you can't mean my Clarinda?' he said. 'She has a soft eye for all men, and there's no d----d airs whatsoever about her.'

''Tis a strappin', great, wallopin' hizzy, the one I'm meaning,' said Nicol, carelessly. He cherished a spite against the tall, grey-eyed girl, with her unmistakable, fastidious air of ladyhood, who so often gave letters into his hands, and he was glad to vent it in words.

'Ah--I take you now!' said Burns, nodding his head, 'and I am rather with you there, I think. A cold, haughty miss! A feather in Society's cap, no doubt; while the likes of us are but hob-nails in its shoes. But she has a voice--a voice that--'

'Here--gie's the letter!' said Nicol, rudely interrupting what promised to become a rhapsody. 'When is it that you leave the town for the south country?' he suddenly asked, turning at the door.

'Never speir at me, lad,' answered the poet, whimsically. 'Ask the star of love that governs my destiny!'

'Tuts--havers!' retorted Nicol, irritably; he was in no mood for trifling, and the poet's most persuasive airs (he could coax like a child) were lost upon him. 'I tell you this, once for all,' he went on, 'you must sort your private matters for yourself before ye go. There must be none of your baggages, gentle or simple, skirling round this door when you're away. For I'll not have it!'

'Sure, Willie, man, there's something up with you the day,' murmured the poet, wheedlingly. 'Was it last night's bowl? 'Od, we kept it up late, and 'twas a winking brew. My own headpiece dirls yet!' But his friend did not deign a reply. He had gone off to find a shovel and broom, proceeding therewith to sourly sweep the snow from the doorstep of genius; which humble task performed, he set off to the Potterrow with the very worst grace in the world.

The Bard, left to himself, twirled absently in his fingers Clarinda's last effusion, while he lost himself in meditation. To the ingenious reader it will be clear that 'Sylvander' wearied of the correspondence. It may be doubted whether a man can keep the Platonic ball a-rolling beyond a certain number of weeks with any satisfaction. A woman wearies of this specious form of humbug less easily, perhaps,--she has more to lose by its abandonment. 'Clarinda's' letters grew longer day by day, while 'Sylvander's' dwindled, and became irregular. Frequent interviews, indeed, now took the place of letters, and of these the poet was by no means tired. They had a special flavour--exquisite even to the blunted palate of Don Juan. Here was an intrigue, and yet not an intrigue, with a little woman who combined a thousand fascinations in her dainty person: the intellectual bias, the ardent temperament, quick passions, and yet a tantalising prudence which armed her with tormenting scruples exquisitely provocative to this tempter, who, with the full force of his genius and his overpowering personality, lured her from safety. Poor Nancy! she had thought to dally with a giant, and hold him in the delicate chains of her influence; but the giant had her in his tremendous hands, and they were like to brush the bloom from her butterfly-like being. Nevertheless did the giant curse himself, because he could not leave her, and could not, though business, honour, and duty pressed him on all sides, forego the delicacies of this stolen love-feast. Day after day he postponed his departure, already so long delayed by his accident. He was long overdue in Dumfriesshire, where he was in treaty for certain farm lands, which were to be the making of his future (or so he hoped). The affair of his appointment in the Excise hung in the balance, and required the pushing of his interest at every turn. His genteel and powerful acquaintance, Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, pressed for his attendance at her house of Dunlop in Ayrshire, in letters quite as long and almost as oppressively affectionate as Clarinda's. And then, at Mauchline, his partial and all-too-prolific Jean had just presented him, and for the second time, with twins. True, in timely and most considerate fashion, these had died; but still, the matter seemed to press for a little personal superintendence. Was ever poet so beset? And yet, he lingered, and the Devil led him to the Potterrow.

*CHAPTER XXX.*

For some two or three weeks Herries adhered with wonderful strictness to the sober and sensible terms of courtship laid down between him and Alison. They never wrote to each other, and they very rarely met. The latter contingency, however, arose rather from the sheer pressure of circumstances than from inclination. Mr. Creighton continued to be confined to his rooms by severe illness, and Herries found himself in consequence overwhelmed with business. Not only was the office work doubly heavy in the absence of his partner, but it was constantly interrupted by the necessity of reference to the absent man, as long as he was able in any measure to give his mind to the affairs of his profession. Latterly, this had almost ceased to be the case, for the invalid grew worse rather than better, and Herries's visits quickly changed from those of business to those merely of inquiry. Mr. Creighton lay day after day in that dreary room of his, uncomplaining, somewhat ill-attended, and always lonely, facing, with grim stoicism, the approaching end. His dog, Dick, lay on the bed at his feet, with melting eyes fixed ever on his master's face--uncomprehending, but full of a wise beast's yearning sympathy.

But all this time, at his heart--that newly-discovered organ--Herries longed for Alison. Sometimes he could snatch a brief hour to go to the Potterrow, but, naturally, he hardly ever found Alison alone. These visits of his drove Nancy nearly wild with impatience and with fear--the fear being, of course, that they would clash with those of the poet.

'What in the universe brings the man now?' she would petulantly exclaim. 'Can he not let us be?'

Her _naive_ conviction that a man who had always been adamant to her own charms must necessarily remain so to those of everyone else continued perfectly unshaken. Whether, under any circumstances, she could have believed Herries capable of being in love is very doubtful. But at present the distorting veil of her own half-guilty passion was drawn across her eyes, and she saw nothing.

'Are you never alone?' Herries said fretfully to Alison once, after a singularly irksome visit shared with Nancy and Willy.

'Not very often, sir,' said Alison; and then she added, with a little hesitation, shyly, 'There are Tuesday and Thursday evenings, now, when Nancy goes to hear Mr. Kemp lecture on a missionary project, and I--I do not go, because 'tis Willy's history nights, and I help him with his lessons.'

'Then I'll come those nights, of course!' cried Herries. 'But then, drat him, there will always be the boy!'

'I can sometimes put him to Jean in the kitchen with his book,' said Alison, demurely, and a dimple suddenly showed in one cheek, which Herries had never noticed before.

Jean, in these days, was a great ally of Alison's, and if she saw more than she was meant to see in Herries's visits, she kept her honest counsel.

So Herries came always on these evenings when the exemplary Nancy, who was in her own peculiar fashion extremely pious, attended the lucubrations of her favourite divine. Those were sweet hours to the harassed man, and I do not say they were the less sweet for being stolen. He could lay aside for a brief space the stern responsibilities of the life he took so hardly--let his brain rest, and his heart speak. The little parlour would be, in the twilight of the lengthening evenings, lit only by the firelight and the dying day. If Herries called himself a cold or backward lover, not so, in those dear hours, did Alison find him.

'Ally,' he said one night, 'this secrecy cannot go on for ever, though just now it is conformable enough to my affairs. When shall it end?'

'When I go home, sir, perhaps,' said Alison, timidly.

'Then, when you go home, I come too,' said Herries, softly, 'and make formal propositions to the laird of The Mains for the hand of his eldest daughter?'

'Yes, sir,' said Alison, with shining eyes. They shone because they saw so fair a vision--her happy self returning to her old home, and with her, this true, this gallant lover. She saw the low, old house--the dear, humble rooms of her childhood--her father's face--her sisters crowding round her. Oh! proud the moment when she should show this 'braw wooer' of her own to the mother who would have had her tie herself to Mr. Cheape! Our good Alison was all a woman here, and sweet was the foretaste of a woman's triumph.

'Let it be very soon,' Herries whispered, his lips among the curls at her ear; 'whenever this accursed press of business is over, the sooner the better for me.'

'Whenever Nancy can spare me, sir,' said Alison.

'Why, what can bind you to my cousin, child?' asked Herries; '--I mean as to a particular period of time?'

'I--I am bound, sir,' said Alison, a little unhappily. 'As long as Nancy wants me, I must stay.' The shadow of a hidden thing seemed to fall across her joy. She moved away from her lover.

'Well, I can see no "must" about it,' said Herries. 'You are a strange pair of friends, I often think, you and Nancy! Two creatures more unlike never lived, I believe.'

'I would--I would you could think differently of Nancy,' said Alison, impulsively.

'I do what I can for her in the best way that I am able,' Herries answered, a little curtly, perhaps.

'You do everything in the world for her, sir,' cried Alison, eagerly, 'except--except understand her, I think.'

'What should there be to understand about the little jade?' said Herries, lightly. 'But, nay, I daresay there is too much, and I don't like women who need such a vast deal of understanding. She that I love must be clear as the day to my eyes--no obscurities, no subterfuges, no explanations--and she _is_!'

'But, sir,' said Alison, very much in earnest on this point, 'I would have you understand all that Nancy is to me now--all that she must ever be, whatever happens. I--we both--owe her our happiness, do we not, Archie? But for Nancy, I'd never have come to Edinburgh, nor have seen you.'

'But for Nancy,' cried Herries, gaily, 'you'd be Mrs. Cheape of Kincarley, in the cosy county of Fife! Here's to Nancy, who stole a wife from the laird, and brought one to Archibald Herries, the poor writer of George Street!' And he lifted high a little cup from the mantel, and pretended to drink to the absent mistress of the house. So light-hearted on these happy evenings was Alison's lover.

Then there came the evening--but memorable, alas! for more than this--when Herries brought her his mother's ring. He had found time, and it had taken him many hours after his busy days, to hunt for it in the recesses of his house among the piles of boxes, desks and cases crammed with the relics of the parents he had never known. At last he had got it--a beautiful, clear-set emerald, slipped thirty years ago from a dead woman's hand by the despairing man who had loved her.

The lovers bent over it at the little window, and it gleamed at them in the fading evening light.

'How beautiful,' whispered awestruck Alison, who had never owned a ring in her life. ''Tis much too grand for me, sir, and I--I can give you nothing back.'

'Give me a curl,' said Herries, half in jest. 'The true lover's gift.'

'Would you really like one?' cried Alison, and with characteristic absence of vanity she seized upon one of her finest, and caught up a pair of scissors for the sacrifice.

'Nay, now, not that one,' Herries laughed, forcibly intervening. 'You'd spoil the bonny bunch! She here, a baby one that hides behind your ear--you'd never miss it.' Alison snipped off the 'baby one,' tied it up with a thread of silk from Nancy's basket, and twisted it in a piece of paper, all with her own matter-of-fact and literal air, that made Herries laugh again, and love her more.

'There, sir,' she said. 'I would 'twere a handsomer gift. You know,' she added, 'they say 'tis unlucky to give hair--it means "farewell."'

'Ah, but we're so prosaic a pair, love,' said Herries, half-mocking. 'There's no romantic ill-luck in store for us, be sure. We leave that to the high-flyers.'

Then they went to the window again and bent their heads over the ring. It is hardly fair to spy upon a rising and respectable young lawyer in his softer moments. But if, in the old days at The Mains, Kirsty, the dairy-maid, had had a lover who put an arm around her waist, Alison, as her own good mother might have put it, was 'upsides with her' now.

She and Herries, indeed, were so absorbed in the ring and in each other's company that they heard no sounds outside the little room. Their backs were towards the door, which had an awkward trick of sometimes swinging open unnoticed, when not securely latched. It had swung open now to some movement of the crazy old tenement, and all unknown to the lovers, a figure stood motionless on the threshold. It was a towering figure, but it had a canny step, to which additional stealthiness had been imparted by the simple expedient of removing the stout shoes from the heavy feet. Too often had Robbie Burns crept to clandestine meetings not to know that 'tis pity on such occasions to disturb the neighbours with unseemly clatter on the stairs.

He could see well into the room, for the fire had blazed up brightly, and he perceived perfectly the two figures and their attitude--recognising one.

'Eh, ma lassie,' he ejaculated to himself, 'kissin' and kitlin' like the rest o' us, for all your prudish airs!' And he executed, behind the unconscious pair, a short and silent war-dance on his stocking-soles, brandishing his shoes above his head in the mischievous glee of a schoolboy. But he made no sign. Diving behind the door, he deftly reassumed his foot-gear, and then, with a due and decent rattling of the latch, he made known his presence, and entered the little room.

Alison turned, with a great and visible start, when she heard and saw him. She felt herself grow pale, for she knew that an awkward, and even terrible, moment had come, and that the meeting, which Nancy had schemed for weeks to avoid, must now, by some unforeseen coincidence, take place. But she took her courage in both her hands, and with it there came to her a certain definite sense of relief. At last, she felt, there would be an end to deception.

'This is Mr. Burns, the poet, sir,' she said, in her quiet voice, and turned to Herries.

*CHAPTER XXXI.*

Herries, whose eyes had narrowed and whose lips were set, held his hands behind him and made an inclination so haughty and so slight that it was barely perceptible. Jean brought in the lights.

'We have met ere this, sir, I think,' said Burns, not unpleasantly. He knew Herries perfectly by sight, and had no reason to suppose he would resent the imputation of being seen at some of the first houses in Edinburgh.

'I was hitherto unaware of the honour,' said Herries, with appalling frigidity, and it would have needed no very acute observer to have seen the hot and sensitive blood rush to the poet's face. He, however, contained himself with dignity enough. Alison's fingers, cold with fright, were twisted together with nervousness. She certainly did not improve matters by saying to the poet,--

'Mrs. Maclehose was not expecting you just now, I think, sir?'

'Why, no, madam,' said the Bard; 'but I could not come at a later hour, and I swear the strings of your harp so drew me that I could not forego coming now rather than not at all. We must finish "Lassie wi' the Lint White Locks," and to that grand tune "The Rothiemurchus Rant," or I will go clean _wud_,[*] I think. It rings i' the head o' me half right, and yet not right. Tantalus himself could not endure it.' The poet had set back his shoulders and spoke out freely and boldly, as though by the divine right of his genius the little room and all it held, including Alison, were his. He ignored Herries. As to Herries, Alison could see him without looking at him, could tell the very tilt his fine and scornful brows were set at, could feel, through her very back, the coldness of his stare. And yet her courage rose. Oh, he would be angry--sore displeased! But better by far he should be angry for a little while than any longer deceived.

[*] Mad.

It was fortunate for all concerned that Nancy returned at this critical juncture. She took in the state of matters in an instant, and with ready wit and supple tact did all that one little woman could do to save the situation. She bustled about, she chattered, she rallied the poet on the rareness of his visits (he had been there the previous night), she pulled a chair up to the hearth for Herries, and almost pushed him into it.

'Now, cousin,' she said coolly, 'you'll witness one of our own little symposiums, and hear how marvellously Ally is improving on the harp.' She ardently hoped--though she did not expect--that Herries would go. But this he had no intention of doing. Alison had left the room, and the boy Willy was shouting for Herries from an inner chamber, where he slept, and Herries went to him. Nancy's whole aspect, voice, and manner, changed in his absence.

'For God's sake, Sylvander,' she said, clasping the poet's arm, 'behave yourself this night! Yonder is my most revered, particular, Puritanical cousin and guardian, the lawyer Archibald Herries. A pragmatical creature--no soul, no sympathy--but if he's offended, poor Clarinda is undone! He is all her shield against the cruel world--all the worldly hope of her poor, deserted babes. I implore you have a care not to offend him by your manners to your poor friend.'

'My bare existence offends him,' said the poet, shrewdly enough. 'What right,' he continued bitterly, 'has the poor ploughman to breathe the same air with so fine a gentleman as Mr. Herries?'

'Oh, heavens!' cried Nancy, half beside herself. 'Never heed him. Are you not worth a hundred of such poor dried sticks as he? Only think of your poor Clarinda and be careful! 'Twould indeed be almost better could you go.'

'I thank you, madam,' said the Bard, grimly; 'but I think I'll stand my ground, unless you put me to the door.'

'Then, for God's sake, give all your heed to Ally,' cried Nancy; 'not a look, not a word, but of merest civility to Clarinda!'

The poet cocked his eye. He was about to tell what he had seen that evening on first entering the room, but he checked himself: telling tales was not his weakness. And then the idea of a little dalliance with Alison, under the supercilious nose of her lover, by no means came amiss. Here was a little diverting vengeance ready to his hand; he would never carry it too far, he reflected, for, with all his faults, he was generous and good-natured. So he chuckled, and nodded knowingly to Nancy.

In the dark little outer lobby, Alison and Herries had met for a brief moment.

'Archie!' whispered Alison, with an outstretched hand. But he turned upon her a look of offence so cold, that she was silenced, and her arm fell to her side.

'I did not know,' he said icily, 'of Miss Graham's intimate acquaintance with the poet Burns!' And he brushed past her into the parlour. Alison, feeling as though she had been struck, followed him. It had been easy to bear his anger in advance; but oh! she had not known how hard it would be--how hard to meet that changed look in his face, that coldness in his voice. The wave of courage that had risen so high within her, receded; but she forced it back. Better he should be angry than deceived. She did not realise as yet the intricate, net-like nature of deception, so loth to set one free.

The evening passed. To all outward appearances it was a musical evening of undeniable edification to all concerned, when a great poet might have been seen unbending himself, and honouring, with much gallant attention, the accomplished young lady who helped him with her harp and song. Nancy sat in her accustomed place, wreathed in smiles, and dispensing sugared words and glances. Herries, indeed, was totally silent, but it might have been the silence of appreciation. Alison and her harp, the poet seated near her, made a central and striking group in the little room. How fair--how singularly fair--she looked that night! So, at least, it seemed to her lover, watching her from under lowered lids, with anger--the anger of love and longing--at his heart. The poet, too, looked well: strong, manly, massive. Herries, as he watched him bend over Alison that fine frame and splendid head, hated him at that moment, not, I fear, for his vices, but for his thews and sinews, his sun-browned comeliness and daring eye. Like many men, slenderly moulded, and of delicate constitution, Herries had a passionate and jealous admiration of manly beauty hardened and developed by all out-door and vigorous pursuits. Necessity had doomed him to a sedentary life, but it was against every taste and inclination, every instinct of his being. He felt now, angrily, that this creature--this ploughman--belittled him. Certainly the contrast between them was sufficiently striking; it was the contrast between porcelain and bronze. Yet never had the peculiar grace of Herries, the marked refinement, the purity of his chiselled face, shone more by contrast. So, at least, it seemed to one who saw him, whenever she dared steal a glance upon her angry Jove.

They could not make much headway with the song that night, probably because Alison's wits were wandering. Burns was working up, after his usual methods, the 'Lassie wi' the Lint White Locks,' some fag-end of an old, forgotten country catch, which he set in the jewels of his own deathless words, and sought to match to some old tune. Alison had found the air; over and over again she played it, and sang the words as the poet said, them at her ear. The little room seemed full of the air, of the words, of the spirit of song:--

_'Lassie wi' the lint white locks,_
_Bonnie lassie, artless lassie!_
_Wilt thou wi' me tend the flocks?_
_Wilt thou be my dearie, O?'_

Over and over and over again--the little fleering, jeering, heartless tune, with yet its sub-note of pathos and of pain, the tinkle of the harp, the girlish voice singing, the poet's deeper tones in speech. Herries had no ear for music or for verse, yet that air and those words stayed with him all his life. He could never hear a boy whistle the one, or a lass lilt the other at her work, without an unbearable stab of pain.

When the singing was over, it became apparent to the astute hostess of the Potterrow that each of her guests meant to outstay the other. Herries made no move. The poet, glowering somewhat, now that the mood of inspiration had left him, chafed visibly under the other's sneering silence and marked aloofness. In spite of his natural manliness and independence, he was agonisingly sensitive to a social slight, and helpless under it. Yet neither would he give in. It grew late. The poet, it transpired, contemplated an early start the following morning, when he was to ride to Ayrshire, returning in a fortnight or so to town. This forced him, at last, to make a move, for he had affairs to attend to. With a formal adieu to the ladies, and a black look at Herries, which he could not, for the life of him, decide to make into a bow or not, he took his departure.

He was hardly out of the room, when Herries walked to the window and set it open.

'Pah!' he said, 'there's too much of your poet in here!' Then he fell silent, for words wanted him. In olden days he would have rated his cousin in no measured terms. But now the woman he wanted to rate was not his cousin, but another, and his lips were sealed to her in the presence of a third person. Besides, he was not only angry, when it is easy to speak; but he was sore, when it is almost impossible for a proud and sensitive man to find words. And, as yet, he did not know what words to use.

'I'll reserve my criticism on your "symposium" for another occasion, Nancy,' he said. ''Twill be so very full and appreciative a one that 'twill require more time than is left us this evening,' he added significantly. He said good-night to his cousin. To Alison he bowed coldly as he left the room.

'My lord is fine and angry,' said Nancy, as she shut the door on him, 'but that's of course. On the whole, the matter has passed off better than I could have expected, though Lord only knows what is to come. 'Twas at _your_ feet the poet sat, Ally, no doubt about that!' And she tittered, well pleased.

'Oh, Nancy, Nancy!' cried Alison; she knew not what she was about to say, but the impulse seemed to be on her to be out with it all.

'Hush, child!' said Nancy, sharply. 'Listen!' There was a bounding step upon the stair, and she ran to the door, laughing, and flung it wide. The poet had tricked the lawyer prettily. He had simply hidden himself in a dark niche of the stair until he saw his enemy depart, and here he was again, bursting with successful mischief.

'Did Clarinda fancy her Sylvander would leave her with a formal, cold farewell?' he asked, with a fine rolling eye.

Alison ran to her room, and shut herself up in it in a passion of just anger--just, but helpless.

So Clarinda and her Sylvander had a long and tender parting, and felt that they took a well-deserved, as well as most enjoyable, revenge upon her disagreeable relative.

*CHAPTER XXXII.*

Alison's struggles that night were like those of a bird that is caught in a net. The bird cannot free itself, not altogether for want of strength, but because it does not understand the nature of nets. And thus it was with Alison. The meshes, not of her own will or seeking, were all round and about her; so slight, so thread-like they seemed, yet they had entangled her, and the more she strove to cast them off the more they clung. Her lover was offended--justly offended. Alison's straight inward eye saw that at once. She had deceived him, though bitterly against her will. She had connived, and still connived, at his deception by another. That other was her friend and benefactress whose bread she ate, who had loaded her with kindness. She could not unravel the deception. She could not seek forgiveness from her lover by confession without betraying Nancy.

'I see that it is wrong ever to hide anything,' was one of her thoughts that night. ''Twould have been far better to have told Nancy at once that we loved each other.' And yet that deception, if, indeed, it could be called one, had seemed so innocent. It had arisen, not from ideas of expediency, but from sheer strength of feeling--the feeling of reserved and silent natures that longed for privacy in a sacred moment. Had they not a perfect right to keep their happiness to themselves--a happiness that injured or robbed no one--that concerned no one but their two selves? That night it had been in her to tell Nancy, but what would she have gained by such a telling? Was it conceivable that Nancy, even though knowing all, would put matters straight by a full confession to Herries, exposing herself, her passion, her duplicity, and then, renouncing all her misdeeds, sit calmly down to a benignant contemplation of Herries's happiness? Alison almost laughed as she thought of it. No, that was not conceivable. It seemed to her--and Alison was very clear-headed--that a full knowledge of the facts--of the facts that bound her and Herries together--would merely drive Nancy into further and fiercer deceit. She would simply regard them both as enemies leagued together against her, and deceive both, whereas, as yet, she deceived only the one. Not only was there no help, but there might be danger in telling Nancy now.