Sleepy Alison did not pause to enquire whether this was merely a poetical generalisation, or whether the 'kindred spirit' were Mr. Burns. She looked gently and patiently—a little wonderingly, perhaps, at the fretted, passion-tossed little creature at her side.
'Come to bed, Nancy,' she whispered persuasively, as to an excited child. ''Tis so late, dear—long, long past one of the clock.'
'To bed!' exclaimed Nancy. 'And who could sleep, after such an evening as I have spent? But, of course, I'll come, love. 'Tis a world of prose, and one must eat and sleep, as though poesy were not. But, Ally'—she crept close to the girl, and whispered at her ear with flushed face, and brightening eyes—'Ally, he is coming here!'
'Who?' said Alison, a little startled. 'The—the poet?'
'Ay, child,' said Nancy, 'the bard. He's to honour my poor hovel with his presence. Think of it! And you will see him, Ally—ay—and hear him. For don't suppose that I forgot my Ally in my raptures. I said to him, "I have a song-bird, sir, up in my eyrie, whose wood-note wild will delight you." You remember how I told you, Ally, he delights in a voice to sing over to him the old country airs and catches, and this he told me himself to-night. So you must be in song, sweetest—when he comes, in a day or two—and we will tune the old harp, and have a heavenly evening with the Muses.'
This, surely, was a prospect to delight any girl, and fill her brain with dreams. But Alison, as she went to bed that night (prosaic girl—I grieve to state it of a heroine), never thought of the honour in store for her. In the first place, she was sleepy, and in the second—well, in the second, her thoughts seemed inclined to stay elsewhere. There flickered before her eyes—it would come—the most teasing, tantalising little picture—the cameo-like outline of a profile, virile though delicate—and oh, so dreadfully severe; the steely penetration of cold, cold blue eyes; the lines of a figure that held Danny on its knee, and had Willy leaning heavily against its shoulder. And the following, or something like it, was Miss Graham's last waking thought that night.
'I've heard Nancy call him "little," but he's as big as me, and I' (with a deep sigh) 'am so much, much too big for a woman.... If I were as wee as Nancy, I'd call him ... tall.'
CHAPTER XVI.
The figure of Robert Burns at all the Edinburgh parties of the winters of 1786-1787 is as classical among the classical portraits of literary history as that of Byron at Ravenna, or Shelley at Geneva, or Scott among the woods of Abbotsford. It is the imposing and yet pathetic spectacle of a Titan in a chain of flowers. For here was a man, a peasant pure and simple, taken from the plough, to be the pet for a while of fine ladies in genteel drawing-rooms, and the plaything of men, who, though they were pigmies beside him, yet covered him with an easy condescension, and held him as the object of a gracious, if fitful, patronage. Burns had borne the ordeal of his sudden popularity with wonderful steadfastness of mind. The natural shrewdness of the Scottish peasant was combined in him with the splenetic melancholy of the poetical temperament; and the combination aided him to a singularly just view of his position and its dangers. He was never over-sanguine; he suspected that his course, like that of other meteors, would be brief, if brilliant; and, so far as it lay within the bounds of Edinburgh society, so it proved. That society—that brilliant little world of fashion, intellect and power—has been held to account for its treatment of the peasant-poet, whom it fêted for a season, and then dropped. It had hailed him with acclamation because he was a peasant—the more wonderful a genius for being so—and then, because he was a peasant, it held him at arm's length. It was no more than he himself had foretold, though in foretelling it he had hardly realised the embittering effects upon his proud and sensitive temper. It was a great and cruel injustice—the thoughtless inconsistency of a selfish world—but, under the circumstances, it was inevitable and almost natural. It seems certainly to have been the fact that, by the time his first season in the capital was over, the attitude of two-thirds of its society towards the poet was, like that of Herries, one of a growing repulsion.
It was at this juncture, at the beginning of his second season, that Burns met Mrs. Maclehose in the drawing-room of Miss Nimmo. All the little world gathered at that party had smiled at the result; but it was a smile entirely devoid of malice. No one knew, or even thought, any harm of the charming little grass-widow—victim of a heartless desertion—who lived so simply and so blamelessly with her two young children in her garret in the Potterrow, under the strict guardianship of that most respected and rising young man, her cousin, Archibald Herries. Her weakness for the Muses was well known, and her passion to be made acquainted with the poet of the hour had long been a jest. While, as to Burns, there was no question at all what his opinion would be of a pretty and charming young woman of lively parts, who was ready to fall down and worship him. So, when the two came together, and sat the whole evening side by side upon a sofa, engaged in a conversation so absorbing, that they had neither eyes nor ears for the rest of the world—everyone nodded and laughed and let them alone.