Nor was her threat intended as an empty one, for she held on her way direct to the Lawnmarket, where she found George Davidson, to whom she related as much as she had been able to get out of Mysie, and also what had passed at the interview with Balgarnie and his lady. After hearing which, the young writer shook his head.
“You will get a trifle of aliment,” said he; “perhaps half-a-crown a week, but no more; and Mysie could have made that in a day by her beautiful work.”
“And she will never work mair,” said the mother, with a sigh.
“For a hundred years,” rejoined he, more to himself than to her, and probably in congratulation of himself for his perspicacity, “and since ever there was a college of justice, there never was a case where a man pulled up on oath for a promise of marriage admitted the fact. It is a good Scotch law—only we want a people to obey it. But what,” he added again, “if we were to try it, though it were only as a grim joke and a revenge in so sad and terrible a case as that of poor Mysie Craig!”
Words which the mother understood no more than she did law Latin; and so she was sent away as sorrowful as she had come, for Davidson did not want to raise hopes which there was no chance of being fulfilled; but he knew as a Scotchman that a man who trusts himself to “a strae rape” in the hope of its breaking, may possibly hang himself, and so it happened that the very next day a summons was served upon George Balgarnie, to have it found and declared by the Lords of Session that he had promised to marry Mysie Craig, whereupon a child had been born by her; or, in fault of that, he was bound to sustain the said child. Thereupon, without the ordinary law’s delay, certain proceedings went on, in the course of which Mysie herself was examined as the mother to afford what the lawyers call a semiplena probatio, or half proof, to be supplemented otherwise, and thereafter George Balgarnie stood before the august fifteen. He denied stoutly all intercourse with Mysie, except an occasional walk in the Hunter’s Bog; and this he would have denied also, but he knew that he had been seen, and that it would be sworn to by others; and then came the last question, which Mr Greerson, Mysie’s advocate, put in utter hopelessness. Nay, so futile did it seem to try to catch a Scotchman by advising him to put his head in a noose on the pretence of seeing how it fitted his neck, that he smiled even as the words came out of his mouth—
“Did you ever promise to marry Mysie Craig?”
Was prudence, the chief of the four cardinal virtues, ever yet consistent with vice? Balgarnie waxed clever—a dangerous trick in a witness. He stroked his beard with a smile on his face, and answered—
“Yes, once—when I was drunk!”
Words which were immediately followed by the crack of a single word in the dry mouth of one of the advocates—the word “Nicked.”
And nicked he was; for the presiding judge, addressing the witness, said—