Herries felt a great delicacy in presenting himself at the house of mourning, and yet time pressed, and the possession of the letters was of vital importance to him. He waited one day, and then, on the morning of his departure, directed his steps to the Wee Vennel. This time the door was opened to him by Jessie Lewars, her pretty face swollen and discoloured by tears.
'I was directed by—by the late Mr. Burns to call here for a packet of letters,' said Herries, with respectful hesitancy.
'We were bidden to expect you, sir,' answered the girl, and then she added that invitation which, under the circumstances, among the peasantry of Scotland, is never withheld and never refused: 'Will you be pleased to come up the stair and view the corpse, sir?' Herries followed her upstairs, but she did not enter the room with him. He was left to do that alone.
It was the same room in which he had spoken with the poet, but now swept and garnished, and with a Puritan simplicity and dignity in its poor belongings that went strangely to the heart. The widow rose from her seat at the bed's head. Herries had seen her before, but only now realised that this must be Jean Armour. With a singularly unaffected gesture of restrained and decent sorrow, she removed, in silence, the fair white linen kerchief that covered the face of her dead. Herries, with folded arms, and with a singular mixture of emotions, looked long upon the splendid mask. As in life, the dark hair swept the pallid brow, and though the glory of those eyes was quenched under the sealed lids that would lift no more, there was, in the fixed and immutable gravity of the lifeless face, a language beyond all looks, beyond all uttered speech: that air of incommunicable knowledge which, in the Dead, baffles the living with its eternal silence.
After a few minutes the widow, gently and reverently, covered the face once more.
'It was to be,' she said simply, with the quiet fatalism of her class. She turned and took from the table a packet of letters, and handed them to Herries without a word. He noted the quivering of her bloodless lip, but noted, too, the mild placidity of her wise, broad brow. Without some such element of enduring calm, never, surely, could Jean Armour have met the complicated trials of her life.
Herries took the letters from her with an almost humble reverence, and, strangely subdued in spirit, left the house and journeyed from the town.
* * * * *
As Herries, thus leaving Dumfries, turned his horse's head to the north, he was still undecided as to the precise direction he must take. Northwards he must go, but whether straight to Edinburgh, or, with a divergence to the west which would lead him to the home of the woman he had once loved, he could not, deeply though he hated indecision, make up his mind. A singular mood of coldness and hesitancy was upon him, and he could not shake it off. Yet it would be wrong to judge Herries, even now, as a man without feelings; he had feelings, but naturally so deeply hid, and, of late years, so sternly repressed, so purposely held down, that he began to doubt their existence in himself. Where was the enthusiasm, the chivalrous ardour that should have urged him on an errand like this: that errand—a privilege, surely, to any generous man—of reparation to a noble and innocent woman for a cruel wrong? This was his errand now, but it left him cold. No gush of revived passion stirred his heart; he seemed to himself to have become old and pulseless, and, unconsciously, he pictured Alison the same—old too, past feeling. Was she alive or dead? He did not know. Married, perhaps? It might well be, and with another man's children at her knee. She had acted nobly, bravely, in that miserable episode of the past. Well—perhaps—and yet Herries was not even in sympathy with the note of sacrifice in her act. It angered him rather—the injustice, the cruelty of it, and the total unworthiness, in his view, of her for whom the sacrifice had been made. Alison had held Nancy's honour as dearer than his—Herries's—happiness, and had sacrificed him, as well as herself, to her ideas of loyalty to a friend. He doubted whether she had done well: to his present cold mood there seemed a something less noble than quixotism in this—a touch of womanish hysterics. His own part in the affair he felt must be a source of bitterness to him that could never die; yet he would not allow that there could be any element in it whatsoever of remorse. His had been the dupe's part, and, to a man of Herries's proud temper, that was a galling thought, however it might lessen his responsibility. The woman in whom he had believed had been made to appear to him as unworthy of belief—by evidences so strong that to doubt them must have been to doubt the testimony of his senses and his sanity. He had cast her off, but it had not been without question. He had been stern, perhaps—but, in his opinion, it behoved men to be stern where honour was concerned. He had been tricked, and though it was not Alison who tricked him, yet she had connived at the trickery, and stood by and seen him made a fool of. As he went on his way, riding slowly, and resting often, he would take out and read those letters which had been given up to him—those fevered letters of 'Clarinda'—which certainly cleared Alison of every kind of blame, save that of a too yielding good-nature to her unscrupulous friend. How they enraged him, as he read—just as their writer used to do in days gone by—with what an impotent rage against this trivial feminine thing that he despised, and yet that had had power enough almost to ruin his life! Yet the letters brought decision, for they shaped his course, which now definitely took the westward route, towards the Perthshire highlands.
All this time, as he pondered, he had been riding through the classic country—sacred even then, as it is still, to the genius and the name of Burns. He had taken his way along the broad and river-haunted valley of the Nith; he had threaded the wild and hilly country of the Cumnocks; he had rested at Mauchline, and might have seen, without knowing it, Mossgiel. All around him, rich and fair, yellow now to its abundant harvests, spread the country that had nursed the peasant poet to his Titanic manhood—noble valley—rolling river—fertile plain. The lowly farms were eloquent of him; each humble implement of toil—the plough, the harrow and the reaper's hook—spoke of the hardy labours of his strenuous youth. The woods whispered of him; the summer evening breathed the legend of his first idyllic love—seemed instinct with the young undoing of Jean Armour, with the kiss, the jest, the gaiety of rustic courtship. At inn and toll, at kirk and market—yet rang the echoes of his splendid joviality, and by haunted kirkyard wall, and clattering arch and hoary brig, it seemed as though you yet might hear the thundering hoofs of flying Tam o' Shanter's auld mare Maggie. One name only seemed ever on the lips of men and women—and Herries heard it, as it seemed to him, wherever he rode, wherever he rested, wherever he spoke, or ate or slept upon that memorable journey. Strange irony of fate that should lead him—the instinctive enemy of the dead poet—antipathetic to him in every thought and impulse and idea—to haunt these scenes. Stranger still that he should come to them fresh from the last great scene of all—the closing scene in that tremendous tragedy of a poet's life. Even Herries—unimaginative, unsympathetic, cold—felt the coincidence, and felt with it some singular, reluctant, vague understanding of the spirit that had passed away, even though his own wrongs, and the deeper wrongs of another, from the dead man's very hand, cried out for their too-long-delayed redress.