[†] Met.
[CHAPTER XVII
SOCIETY]
LORD BALNILLO looked out of his sedan chair as it emerged from the darkness of a close on the northern slope of the Old Town of Edinburgh. Far down in front of him, where the long alley stopped, a light or two was seen reflected in the black water of the Nor’ Loch that lay between the ancient city and the ground on which the new one was so soon to rise. The shuffling footfalls of his chairmen, echoing off the sides of the covered entry, were drowned in the noise that was going on a little way farther forward, where the close widened out into a square courtyard. One side of this place was taken up by the house of Lady Anne Maxwell, for which the judge was bound.
It had been raining, and Edinburgh was most noisomely dirty under foot, so Balnillo’s regard for his silk-clad legs and the buckled shoes on his slim feet, had made him decide to be carried to his kinswoman’s party. He wore his favourite mouse colour, but the waistcoat under his velvet coat was of primrose satin, and the lace under his chin had cost him more than he liked to remember.
The courtyard sent up a glow of light into the atmosphere of the damp evening, for the high houses towering round it rose black into the sky, limiting the shine and concentrating it into one patch. From above, it must have looked like a dimly illuminated well. It was full of sedan chairs, footmen, lantern-carriers and caddies, and the chattering, pushing, jesting, and oaths were keeping the inhabitants of the neighbouring ‘lands’—such of them as were awake, for Edinburgh kept early hours in those days—from going to sleep.
The sedan chairs were set down at the door, for they could seldom be carried into the low and narrow entrances of even the best town houses, and here, at Lady Anne’s, the staircase wound up inside a circular tower projecting from the wall.
The caddies, or street-messengers of Edinburgh, that strange brotherhood of useful, omniscient rascals, without whose services nothing could prosper, ran in and out among the crowd in search of odd jobs. Their eyes were everywhere, their ears heard everything, their tongues carried news of every event. The caddies knew all that happened in society, on the bench, in shops, in wynds, in churches, and no traveller could be an hour in the town before they had made his name and business common property. In an hour and a half his character would have gone the same way. Their home by day was at the Market Cross in the High Street, where they stood in gossiping groups until a call let one of them loose upon somebody else’s business. It was the perpetual pursuit of other people’s business that had made them what they were.
A knot of caddies pressed round the door of Lady Anne Maxwell’s house as Lord Balnillo, sitting erect in order not to crease his clothes and looking rather like an image carried in a procession, was kept at a standstill whilst another guest was set down. Through the open window of his chair there pressed a couple of inquisitive faces.
“Hey, lads!” cried a caddie, “it’s Davie Balnillo back again!”