'N—not too often, sir,' whispered Alison. The whisper might have stood for the mere coyness of a girl, and so Herries translated it. But in Alison's mind was the troubled knowledge of how little welcome her lover was just now, in the little room which his own liberality helped to make so cosy and so home-like. It was very hard, she thought, but time would doubtless show a way out of the difficulty, if one were only patient.
Alison, indeed, was very grave as she walked home that day, after parting from her lover. She was very happy. Her feeling for Herries had become—as such feelings will with such natures—a part and parcel of herself—the very heart of her. It was a wondrous thing, a miracle, that the one man she had ever known should also be the one man in the world most worthy of love and honour. But then, to reverent and simple minds, the miracle brings awe as well as joy, and Alison was a little afraid of her own happiness, as though it could hardly be meant for such as she. Not for nothing was she the daughter of those bucolic, hard-lived ancestors of hers, who, generation after generation, in the dull obscurity of The Mains, had dragged through joyless and prosaic lives, ignorant of the world beyond the boundaries of their home. Something of a want of buoyancy was Alison's, and it came from that old home source. But she loved,—and the tingle of the new sensation ran through her veins like wine, though it left her sober.
Herries, in the meantime, reached his house in a mood of elation so very singular for him that, had he been like many of his countrymen of that day, superstitious, he would have called it 'fey'—uncanny. Everything seemed to be working together for his good; the stars in their courses fought his battles. Through the least likely source in the world—his cousin—he had found what promised to be the happiness of his life. Approval and passion—how seldom they combine!—met in his tenderness for Alison Graham. There might be other girls more beautiful and more accomplished, but surely there was no other in the world so formed to please him. How sensible she was! Would any other girl have condoned, nay, actually have proposed, a courtship so shorn of the nonsense which by long custom must needs beset all conventional affairs of the kind? Herries reflected, with easy complacency, how exceedingly well it suited him, at this juncture, that his betrothal should be kept a secret. Creighton, he was certain, was either ill, or about to be ill, and during his illness the affair of a new partnership would naturally be in a decent abeyance. The strain of double work and double anxiety must fall upon him, Herries, very severely in the immediate future, and how inexpressibly inconvenient, at such a time, would have been the fuss and the worry of a declared engagement. But there was to be no such foolish demand upon his time and energy, no nonsense of a daily correspondence, or lover-like dancing of attendance on his charmer. He was even bidden not to go too often to the Potterrow! How infinitely to his taste, how admirably suitable, it all was!
Yet, for a young man so perfectly pleased with a wise and sober arrangement of things, that evening in his rooms seemed to pass with extraordinary slowness,—in very truth, with the most appalling tedium. He was restless; he could neither write nor read. He spent the lonely hours lolling now in one chair, now in another, his handsome head thrown back, his eyes beset with dreams. What he dreamed of was a room, so much meaner than his own, a little room, ruddy with fire and candlelight and cosy curtains, where there was a grey-eyed girl, the tinkle of a harp, the notes of a song. He went furtively to a window and looked out, with a certain thought in the back of his mind. But the night was one of whirling snow, dark and wild, for the storm had come.
''Twould be madness to go; they'd think me crazy,' was the thought in his mind. A clock struck, and he laughed. 'Why, they'll be away to their beds!' he said. Certain strings, which appeared to be attached in the neighbourhood of his heart, were pulling him, pulling him to the Potterrow. But this time he withstood their wrenching, and taking a law book from the shelf, set himself to read like a really sensible man.
CHAPTER XXIX.
The lion and the jackal are figures coupled by the natural historian as a matter of course, so that one may presume that every lion has his jackal, to howl before him and to polish the bones which his lionship leaves behind. In human life the same phenomenon appears, and every lion, who is a lion worth mentioning, may have his satellite in a meaner kind of creature, to prepare the way before him and do his dirty work.
The poet Burns was well furnished with one of these necessary adjuncts to a lion's suite, in his friend Nicol, a personage who, after sundry vicissitudes in life, had managed to secure for himself the outwardly respectable post of a teacher in the High School. The chances of tavern life had brought the two together, and flattery, no doubt sincere if fulsome, on the one side, and on the other that necessity to be admired and followed which is the curse of the poetic temperament, sealed their friendship. Yet it is difficult to imagine how Burns, with whom men of a far higher stamp than Nicol, would still gladly have associated, could content himself with the society of one so palpably inferior to himself in all ways. Nicol was a coarse, blustering, unwashen brute, with a violent and jealous temper that the partial poet chose euphuistically to dub 'a confounded strong in-knee'd sort of a soul.' He had, on more than one occasion, ruined the Bard's chances of favour in high quarters, by his ill-bred intrusions and unmannered insolence. He was not a comfortable kind of jackal at all, and yet Burns stuck to him, actuated, no doubt, partly by the kind of sturdy loyalty of which he was capable towards the humble friends of his own sex, and partly by obstinacy. The man hindered him at every turn, but there was no doubting his devotion. And then, he was that kind of coarse instrument which a man is not afraid to use to the most doubtful ends. And the poet, it is likely, had uses only too many for such a tool.
Nicol, during these weeks of which we write, had been having a hard time of it. To be jackal to a lion-poet, with an injured knee-pan and inflamed passions, is no sinecure. Not for weeks had the unfortunate man had a moment to be called his own. When he was not carrying messages or delivering letters—waiting for answers, or receiving them at the door—he was listening to the anathemas of the afflicted poet, who, maddened by confinement, spent his time in cursing fate, and in the writing of those letters which he pestered his adherent, in season and out of season, to carry for him. The inclement weather which had now set in, added very much to Nicol's hardships. On a certain morning, with the snowdrifts piled high against the doors, he struggled forth to see his friend, but armed with a grim resolution that, on such a day, he would do no more.
He found the poet, with his injured leg upon a stool, scribbling for dear life. The dingy, ill-kept room was close, with a closeness strongly flavoured with last night's potations. The Bard, as he wrote to his Clarinda, was 'pretty hearty, after a bowl busily plyed last night from dinner-time to bed-time.' He folded and fastened this precious missive as Nicol entered.