CHAPTER XLIV.
'Will you not be seated, sir?' said Burns, pointing to the chair which Jessie Lewars had vacated. Herries, with a gesture and an inclination, intimated his wish to stand; and throughout the interview he continued to do so at some little distance from the sick man, his head bent, his eyes upon the ground, save when they were raised to meet the poet's dark and penetrating gaze.
'Now, sir,' the Bard began, raising himself with difficulty in his chair, 'have patience while you listen to me. You owe me the hearing which the dying may exact from those they leave behind.'
'I will listen to you,' said Herries, shortly.
'Last night,' continued Burns; 'these two or three nights, indeed, I have seen you pass my door, unwitting; for here I sit with a sick man's look-out upon the world he must soon leave. I remembered you, and a bit of the Devil's work I did when the wine was red and ginger hot in the mouth came back to me, for it concerned your house. I have gossips in the town—too many, perhaps—and I soon heard that the great Edinburgh lawyer, Mr. Herries, was abiding at the "Globe," alone, but for his servant. Now, why alone?' The questioner's dark eye rested upon Herries's with a look half quizzical, half sombre.
'Where is man's God-given companion—where is the wife, sir?'
'I have no wife,' said Herries, sternly, most bitterly resenting the allusion to his private matters—yet, somehow, held by the overpowering personality of his interlocutor.
'What?' cried Burns. 'Then where is the lass that you loved—for you did love her—the big, bonny body wi' the bunch o' curls? Well I mind her, though she liked me little!'
'If you speak of Miss Graham,' said Herries, his lips hardly able to form the name, 'I have never seen her or heard of her since the night I took her from your house.'
'Man alive!' ejaculated the poet, staring at his guest in blank astonishment. 'Is it possible? That there was a mischief brewing through some trickery of that sour devil, Nicol, I knew—fu' though I was, and roarin' fu' that night. But, as I live, I never thought but that you and the lass would kiss and make it up or ever you got the length of Princes Street!'