"Compose yourself," said Innes; "you have been strangely tried to-night, and your spirits are still much flurried. Set yourself to sleep, for never had man more need; and my companion and I shall watch beside you during the night. Remember you are our patient, and entirely under our control." The manager good-humouredly acquiesced in the prescription, and in a few minutes after was fast asleep.
"Now, Innes," said Sandy, "as there's to be no bed for us to-night, you maunna forget that you're pledged to me for your story. Remember, my bonny man, our bargain when ye got mine."
"I do remember," replied Innes; "but I well know you will be both tired and sleepy ere I have done."
"I have long had a liking for you, Sandy," continued Innes—"I knew you from the first to be a man of a different cast from any of our fellows; and, ever since I saw you take part with the poor Indian, whom the two drunken Irishmen attempted to rob of his rum and his wife, I have wished for your friendship. It is not good for man to be alone, and I have been much too solitary since I entered with the company. You were, when in Scotland, the victim of a silly prejudice against a humble, but honest calling, but you could have lived in it, notwithstanding, had not a love for wandering drawn you abroad. I, on the contrary—thought like the hare with many friends, I was a favourite with every one—was literally starved out of it. My father was a gentleman farmer, not thirty miles from Inverness, whom the high war prices of cattle and grain had raised from comparative poverty to sudden, though short-lived, affluence. No man could be more sanguine in his hopes for his children. He had three boys, and all of us were educated for the liberal professions, in the full belief that we were all destined to rise in the world, and become eminent. Alas! my brother, the divine, died of a broken heart, a poor over-toiled usher in an English academy; my brother, the doctor, perished in Greenland, where he had gone as the surgeon of a whaler, after waiting on for years in the hope of some better appointment; and here am I, a lawyer—prepared to practise, as soon as we get courts established among the red men of Hudson's Bay. But I anticipate. I am not sure nature ever intended that I should stand high as a scholar; but I was no trifler, and so passed through the classes with tolerable eclat. I am not at all convinced, either, that I possess the capabilities of a first-rate lawyer; but I am certain I have seen men rise in the world with not more knowledge, and with, perhaps, even less judgment to direct it. What I chiefly wanted, I suspect, was a genius for the knavish parts of the profession. Will you believe me when I say I have known as much actual crime committed in the office of a pettifogging country lawyer, as I ever saw tried in a sheriff court. Oh, what finished rascality have I not seen skulking under the shelter of the statute-book!—what remorseless blackening of character, for the sake of a paltry fee!—what endless breaches of promise!—what shameless betrayals of trust!—what reckless waste of property! Sandy Munro, I am a poor Hudson's Bay fur-gatherer, and can indulge in no other hope than that I shall one day lay my bones at the side of some nameless creek or jungle; but rather that, a thousand, thousand times, than affluence, and influence, and respectability—ay, respectability—through the wretched means by which I have seen all these secured!"
"You are an honest chield, Innes," said Sandy, grasping him by the hand. "I have had a regard for you ever since I first saw you; and the mair I ken o' you the mair my respect rises."
"My father," continued Innes, "was respectably connected; I had a turn for dress, a tolerably genteel figure, and was fond of female society; and, during the four years I served with the lawyer in Inverness, I found myself a welcome guest in all the more respectable circles of the place. Scarcely a tea-drinking or dancing party was got up among the élite of the burgh, but I was sure of an invitation. I danced, played on the flute, handed round the tea and the sweetmeats—all par excellence—and was quite an adept in the art of speaking a great deal without saying anything. In short, I became a most accomplished trifler—an effect, perhaps, of my very imperfect love of my profession. The men who rise to eminence, you know, rarely begin their course as fine fellows; and were it not for a circumstance to which I owe more of my happiness and more of my misery than to any other, I would have had to attribute my failure in life less to an untoward destiny than to the dissipation of this period. But I was taught diligence by the very means through which most young people are untaught it. I fell in love. There was a pretty, simple lassie, the daughter of one of the bailies of the place, whom I used frequently to meet with in our evening parties, and with whose appearance I was mightily taken from the moment I first saw her. She united, in a rare degree, all the elegance of the young lady with all the simplicity of the child; and, with better sense than falls to the share of nineteen-twentieths of her sex, was more devoid than any one I ever knew of their characteristic cunning. You have heard, I daresay, that young ladies are anxious about getting husbands; but, trust me, it is all a mistake. The anxiety is too natural a one to be experienced by so artificial a personage as the mere young lady. It is not persons but things she longs after—settlements, not sweethearts. I have had a hundred young-lady friends, who liked my youth and gentility, and who used to dance, and romp, and chat with me, with all the good-will possible, but who thought as little of me as a sweetheart as if I were one of themselves. Thoughts of that tender class were to be reserved for some rich Indian, with a complexion the colour of a drum-head, and a liver like a plum-pudding. This bonny lassie, however, was born—poor thing!—with natural feelings. We met, and learned to like one another; we sang and laughed together; talked of scenery and the belles lettres; and, in short, lost our hearts to one another ere we so much as dreamed that we had hearts to lose. You must be in love, Sandy, ere all I could tell you could give you adequate notions of the happiness I have enjoyed with that bonny, kind-hearted lassie. Love, I have said, taught me diligence. I applied to my profession anew, determined to be a lawyer, and the husband of Catherine. I waded through whole tomes of black-letter statutes, studied my way over forty folios of decisions, and did what I suppose no one ever did before—read Grigor on the Game-laws. Not half-a-dozen practitioners in the country could draw out a deed of settlement with equal adroitness—not one succeeded in putting fewer double meanings into a will. My master used to consult me on conveyancing; and when, at the expiry of my term, I left his office and set up for myself, you will not wonder it was with the hope that my at least average acquirements would secure for me an average portion of success. You will see how that hope was realised.
"The father of my sweetheart was, as I have said, a Inverness bailie; he was extensively engaged in trade, and all deemed him a rising man; but the case was otherwise. An unlucky speculation, and the unexpected failure of a friend, involved him in ruin; and I saw his office shut up not three weeks after I had opened my own. A week after brought me the intelligence of my father's death. He had been sinking in the world for years before; getting, much against his will, into arrears with every one; and now, immediately on his death, all his effects were seized by the laird. He was an easy-tempered, obliging man—credulous and confiding—and hence, perhaps, his misfortunes. You will deem me cold and selfish, Sandy, to speak in this way of my father; and yet, believe me, I felt as a son ought to feel; but repeated blows have a stupefying effect, and I can now tell you, with scarcely a twinge, of hopes blighted and friends lost. All my hopes of rising by my profession soon failed me. No one entered my office. Though not without some confidence in my acquirements, as you may see, I have ever had a sort of shamefaced bashfulness about me, that has done me infinite harm. People were afraid to trust their cases with one who seemed to mistrust himself—the forward, the impudent, and the unprincipled carried off all the employment, and I was left to starve."
"Honest, unlucky chield!" ejaculated Sandy, with a profound yawn. "One might guess, by the way ye bargain wi' the Indians, that ye hae a vast deal owre little brass for makin a fortune by the law. But what cam o' your puir simple lassie, Innes, when her father broke?"
"Ah, dear, good girl," replied Innes, "with all her simplicity, she was, by much, better fitted for making her way through the world than her lover. She was highly accomplished, drew beautifully, read Chateaubriand in the original, and had a pretty taste for music. Through the recommendation of a friend, she was engaged as governess in the family of a Highland proprietor, in which, when I left Scotland, she continued to be employed—well, I trust, for her own happiness—usefully, I am sure, for others. I shall forget many things, Sandy, ere I forget the day I passed with her on the green top of Tomnahurich, ere we parted, as it proved, for ever. You know that beautiful hill—the queen of all our Highland Tomhans—with the long winding canal on the one side, and the brattling Ness on the other, and surrounded by an assemblage of the loveliest hills that ever dressed in purple and blue. It was a beautiful day in early spring, and the sun shone cheerily on a hundred white cottages at our feet, each looking out from its own little thicket of birch and laburnum, and on the distant town, with its smoke-wreath resting over it, and its two old steeples rising through. The world was busy all around us: we could see the ploughman following his team, and the mariner warping onward his vessel; the hum of eager occupation came swelling with the breeze from the far-off streets—and yet there was I, a poor supernumerary among the millions of my countrymen, parting almost broken-hearted from her whom I loved better than myself, just because there was no employment for me. Oh, the agony of that parting! But 'tis passed, Sandy, and 'tis but folly thus to recall it. No one, as I have already told you, ever thought of entering my office—no one, save my landlord and the old woman with whom I lived; and you may believe there was little of comfort in their visits. I was in arrears to the one for rent, and to the other for lodging. So far was I reduced, that, in passing through the old woman's room, I have been fain to take a potato from off her platter, and that single potato has formed my meal for the time. On one occasion I was for two days together without food."
"Goodness gracious!" exclaimed Sandy—"what came o' a' the grand freends that used to gie ye the teas and suppers? Had they nae bowels ava?"