Burns at this time had come to Edinburgh on business connected with the publication of his works. He was lodged in a couple of rooms in St. James's Square in the New Town, and kept, on the whole, but doubtful company. Fine friends, as already hinted, were growing cold, and fine ladies, in high places, fastidious. In the lesser intellectual circles—as at Miss Nimmo's—he was still welcome. But it was not a happy or prosperous period in his life. Money matters worried, and conscience pricked. A summer's dalliance in his native place had reduced his much-enduring Jean Armour to a condition which resulted in that meek woman's ignominious expulsion, for a second time, from her father's house. Other matters, also of a tender and delicate nature, were giving trouble. From a poet's love affairs it is seldom discreet to lift the veil. It can only be said that their frequency never seems to negative their fervour, while they last. Burns had a capacious heart, which could furnish shrines for several idols at one time; a complex nature where, as ever, the Soul and the Satyr strove for unequal mastery. It may be imagined how delightful to such a temperament was the balm of Mrs. Maclehose's generous adulation. The poet was precisely in that condition when a man desires to be soothed, to be flattered, to be made to forget his own shortcomings and the world's cruelty. And who so clever to keep him in such a mood as the fascinating little grass-widow of the Potterrow? So their spirits rushed together, and they swore an eternal friendship on the spot. In a couple of days, it was arranged, the poet should come and take a dish of tea with Mrs. Maclehose at her house, and that lady was in the seventh heaven. But, to quote the bard himself,—
'The best laid plans o' mice and men
Gang aft a-gley'—
and the tea-drinking, at that early date, never took place. Either on the way home from Miss Nimmo's, or on some errand the following day, the poet was knocked down in the street by a coach, and thus, instead of hastening to the Potterrow on the wings of an exalted friendship, he found himself crippled and confined to his lodging in St. James's Square with a broken knee-pan and a highly-irritated temper. In the Potterrow the news of this untimely accident came as a crushing disappointment. Nancy cried like a child, and Alison, who had not shed such tears herself since she was seven years of age, strove to comfort her with every device of words and every promise of future compensation that she could think of.
'He'll come yet—of course he will, Nancy,' she said cheerfully; 'and then, you know, he'll write.'
Alas! easy words! Had poor Alison but foreseen with what a fatal facility he would, and did, write: with what awful and voluminous avidity they both would fall upon pens, ink and paper, she would not have spoken so lightly. Could she but have had a vision of that weary sequence of thick letters, that only too often her own faithful though unwilling hands would have to carry, she would not have been so delighted when the first one was written and the first received. Nancy, in a fever of thwarted eagerness, had at first threatened to rush off to visit the bard in his confinement.
'I must see him!' she cried, stamping her little foot. 'I shall, and will! What's to prevent me? Am I not a wife and mother? Are we not all relatives—sons and daughters of Adam? Why should a censorious world put difficulties in the way of my visiting my poor friend? I'll not be bound by these ridiculous conventionalities!' But Alison's sound natural sense averted the threatened indiscretion.
''Twould embarrass the poor man to receive you, Nancy,' she sensibly said. 'You know you have told me yourself how low is his station in the world, and 'tis little likely he has a room fit to see ladies in, and it would hurt his pride that you should find that out. And then—and then, your cousin, Mr. Herries, who does not favour—'
'Drat my cousin!' said Nancy, petulantly, 'and you to quote him, as solemn as the owl himself! But 'tis true—God's truth, indeed—I daren't offend him. And most consumedly it would offend his highness—such a visit on my part—if it got to his ears. No, you are right, Ally—wise, Ally! I see it. I'll abandon this visit, though 'twould but be one of kindness and mercy. I'll take me to my pen. Thank Heaven for the pen, Ally, that permits no real separation—no severing of souls—between friend and friend!'
The Pen! Little, busy, inky devil, that, when the tongue would stammer and the lips be stiff, blabs out the inmost secrets of the heart! Betrayer and tell-tale, with a treachery that is worse than tongues, because indelible! Specious ally, who turns king's evidence, and becomes the most relentless witness to our follies! Pin's point, now steeped in honey and now dipped in gall, oh, power of hurt, far deadlier than the honest sword, this pricking Pen! Sensible Alison, when, long, long years after this, she came to hold in her hand certain letters, yellowed and faded with age, and to read, marvelling greatly, their turbulent, passionate pages, thought this, and more, of the dangerous doings of the quill; although, to be sure, she never expressed herself in the language of hyperbole. That was not her way.
When, however, the first two or three of these letters were written, and their answers received, in those gay early days in the Potterrow, Alison was delighted, because they made her friend so happy.