You only think you think you see.
Then thinking weaves so many a lie,
Methinks this world is ‘all my eye.’”
But even in his grief and sacred fear he could not help saying to himself, “Gude Lord! if that eemage werena frightfu’, would it no be funny? And what will Robina say? Nae doubt she is at this very moment sitting at her tea in Berenger’s Close, thinking upon my calamity. What will she say when I tell her that I saw her in the High Street dressed in my Sunday suit, walking just as if she were Provost Wilson himsel? I wouldna wonder if she should get into ane o’ her laughing fits, even in very spite o’ her grief for the awful condition of her loving husband. At any rate, it’s time I were hame, when I canna tell what I am to see next, nor can even say which end o’ me is uppermost.”
Nor scarcely had he finished his characteristic soliloquy, when a hand was laid on his shoulder. It was that of the corporal; but how was David to know that? Why, he felt Bill’s hand; and to make things more certain, he even laid his own hand upon the solid shoulder of the sturdy city guardsman; adding, for still greater proof—
“Did you meet and speak to any one up the street there?”
“The niver a living soul,” said the corporal, “as I’m a sinner; but come along, man, to the Prophet Amos’s,” (a well-known tavern in the Canongate,) “and let us have a jolly jug, for I’m to be on duty to-night, and need something to cheer me up; and the colour of ale will sit better on your cheeks when you go home to Robina than that saffron. Are you well enough, David? I think I might as well ask the question of a half-hanged dog.”
“Half or hale hanged,” replied David, as he eyed his friend suspiciously, “I canna be the waur o’ a jug o’ ale.”
An answer which was perhaps the result of sheer despair, for the conviction of the “real unreality” of what he had seen was now so much beyond doubt that he began to submit to it as a doom; and what is irremediable becomes, like death, to be bearable, nay, even accommodating to the routine of life; and so the two jogged along till they came to the Prophet’s, where they sat down to their liquor and, we may add, loquacity, of which latter Mucklewham was so profuse, that any other less simple person than David might have thought that the guardsman wanted to speak against time. But David suspected nothing, and he was the more inclined to be patient that his friend had promised to pay the score.
“And when saw ye Robina?” said David.