"What is it?"
"Gang to Mr B——, the fiscal, and tell him that the corpse is there, and that the man is here, and say naething o' me; do this, or I'll never haud up my hands again for grace and mercy."
Ann was silent, only driving the wheel, the sound of which in the silent house—dark enough, too, in the small light of the oil cruise over the fireplace—was all that was heard, save the occasional sobs of the unhappy victim of conscience.
"I canna, Christian; I canna, lass. I'll hang nae man for the death o' a light-o'-love limmer, and to save the conscience o' ane wha, if she didna see something wrang when it was wrang, ought to hae seen it."
"I repent and am sair in the spirit," replied Christian; "but if I had tauld him what I suspected was wrang between Spynie—and ye ken he was a lord, and titles cast glamour ower the een o' maidens—and my mistress, it would hae been a' the same. But wae's me!" she added, as she sighed from the depths of the heart, and wrung her hands, "I had a lichtness about me myself. A woman's no in her ain keeping at wild happy nineteen. The heart is aye jumping against the head. But oh, how changed when the Auld Licht shone ower me! And hae I no been a guid wife to Geordie Gourlay? Will you no help me, woman?"
"I hae said it," replied Mrs Hall, as the energy of her resolution passed into the moving power of the wheel, and the revolutions became quicker and quicker.
The Cameronian stood for a moment looking at her—the lips compressed, the brow knit, the hand firmly bound up, and striking it upon the wall.
"Ye're o' my faith," said she bitterly; "and may the Evil One help ye when ye're in need o' the Lord!"
And with these words she left her old friend, drawing the door after her with a clang, which shook the crazy tenement. In a moment she was in the street, now beginning to be deserted. The wooden-pillared lamps, so thinly distributed, and their small dreary spunk of life, showed only the darkness they were perhaps intended to illumine; and here and there was seen a gay-dressed sprig of aristocracy, with his gold-headed cane, cocked hat, and braided vest, strolling unsteadily home, after having drunk his couple of claret. Solitary city guardsmen were lounging about, as if waiting for the peace being broken, when an encounter occurred between some such ornamented braggadocio and a low Wynd blackguard—ready to use his quarter-staff against the silver-handled sword of the aristocrat; and here and there the high-pattened, short-gowned light-o'-love, regardless of the loud-screamed "gardy-loo," frolicked with "gold lace and wine," or swore the Edinburgh oaths at untrue and discarded lovers of their own degree. But guidwife Christian saw none of all these things; only one engrossing vision was in her mind, that of the sleeping scene of enchantment in the old flat, associated with the figure of the stranger;—one feeling only was paramount in her heart, the inspired awe of the conviction that these petrified relics of another time, so long back, were there waiting for her to touch them, that they should be disenchanted, and speak and tell their tale, and then rot and depart, according to the usual law of change, and corruption, and decay.
In this mood she got to the top of the Wynd, and was hurrying along the first or covered portion, overspread by the front lands, and therefore dark, when she encountered a man rolled up in a cloak. Even in the dim light coming from the street lamp on the main pavement, she recognised him in a moment. He was slouching down by the side of the wall, and did not seem to notice her. So Christian held back, until he had got farther on. She felt herself concentrated upon his movements, and observed that he hung about her own stair, standing in the middle of the close, with his eye fixed on the dark windows of the deserted flat. There was no meaning in his action. It seemed simply that his eye was bound to that house. So far Christian understood the ways of the world; but there are deeper mysteries there than she wotted of or dreamed just then. A man will examine a gangrene if it is hopeful; and will hope, and shrink, and be alarmed, when the hope fails only but a little; nay, he will dread the undoing of the bandages, lest the hope of the prior undoing should be changed by the new aspect into a conviction of aggravation; but there is a state of that ailment, as of moral ills, where all hope having vanished, despair comes to be reconciled to its own terrors, and the eye will peer into the hopeless thing, ay, and be charmed with it, and dally with it, as an irremediable condition, which is his own peculium, a part of his nature, so far changed. He then becomes a lover of pity, as before he was a seeker for hope; and, like a desperate bankrupt, will hawk the balance-sheet of his ills, to make up for the subtraction from his credit by the sympathy of the world. So did that man look upon that house, a hopeless sore, after twenty years pain and agony, with these green spots, and the caustic-defying "proud flesh." Was not the fleshless corpse of his dead wife still there? She was a skeleton; but he could only fancy her as he had seen her twenty years before, a young and beautiful woman. Nor was he alarmed as Christian, weary of waiting but not unsteeled now for a recognition, stept forward and confronted him.