Nancy Stair Part 26

Janet said, after she had narrated the doings at the inn. "On Tuesday, a little after noon, she came to me saying that she'd been in such an excited state, she was off alone to collect herself by a walk, and while she was out she pa.s.sed a girl who was putting some linen on the bleach-green; Nancy spoke to her concerning some lace with which the garments were trimmed, and as they talked Rab Burns pa.s.sed them, with four or five of his cronies, and the girl broke into a pa.s.sion at sight of him, shaking her fist after him and calling him foul names as he went down the lane.

"At this, another girl, who was soon to be a mother, came weeping from the house, and Nancy emptied her purse to them before they parted.

"When she came in," Janet went on, "her face was white and set, her eyes seeing nothing, and when Rab Burns sent up his name to her that night she said to the maid, 'Tell Mr. Burns that Miss Stair will not see him!' and sat by the window, staring into the starlight, where I found her at five the next morning with the fever upon her and her wits gone gyte."

I have had much sorrow in my time, but the agony of suspense and suspicion with which the next few days were filled pales every grief of my life that went before this time. Was it possible, I asked G.o.d, that my wee bit, wonderful la.s.sie, my Little Flower, had bloomed to be trodden under foot by a plowman of Ayr?

McMurtrie drove me from the house at times for rest of mind as well as exercise, and one night, at the week's end, having walked farther than usual, I entered an ale-house in the Cowgate for something to quench my thirst. There was a man standing by the window, and at sight of him, for it was Robert Burns, and the time was not yet come for me to say to him what might have to be said, I drew back, thinking myself unseen, and closed the door. I had gone but a few steps in the darkness when I felt a hand clapped on my shoulder, and turning, found Burns himself beside me.

"Come back," he cried, "come back; I want a word with ye, Lord Stair.

You've come down," he cried, "to take your daughter from the company of those unfit for her to know. And you're right in it. But the thought that ye showed toward me when you went out to avoid my company is wrong; wrong, as I must face my Maker in the great last day! I've had my way with women; but in this one case I've taken such care of her as ye might hae done yourself!

"She's found the truth of me, and our friends.h.i.+p is by with forever! I know that well.

"But tell her from me, will ye not, that such righting of a wrong as can be done I am determined to do, and that the la.s.sie she kens of is to be my wife as soon as she chooses. Tell her," and here the tears stood big in his eyes, "that I am sorrier than I can ever say that her mind has been a.s.soiled by my wicked affairs--" and here he broke forth into a sudden heat--"G.o.d Almighty!" he cried, "if a woman like that had loved me, Shakespeare would have had to look to his laurels. Aye! and Fergusson, too. The Lord himself made me a poet, but she might have made me a man!"[6]

[6] Lord Stair mentions here that he afterward had from this same girl (Mrs. Nellie Brown), the following description of the poet's first meeting with the sister, Jean Armour:

"D'ye see Sam McClellan's spout over the gate there? Weel, it was just whaur Rab and Jean first foregathered. Her and me had gaen there for a gang o' water, an' I had fill't my cans first an'

come ower here juist whaur you an' me's stan'in. When Jean was fillin' her stoups, Rab Burns cam' up an' began some nonsense or ither wi' her, an' they talked an' leuch sae lang that it juist made me mad; to think, tae, that she should ha'e a word to say wi' sic a lowse character as Rab Burns. When she at last cam'

ower, I gied her a guid hecklin. 'Trowth,' said I, 'Jean, ye ocht to think black-burnin' shame o' yersel. Before bein' seen daffin'

wi' Rab Burns, woman, I would far raither been seen speakin'--to a sodger.' That was the beginnin' o' the unfortunate acquaintance."

The marriage between the two was acknowledged to the world in 1787.--EDITOR.

CHAPTER XIX

THE QUARREL BETWEEN DANVERS AND NANCY

We were back at Stair for nearly a fortnight, with Nancy quite herself again, before she took me into her confidence regarding the Burns experience. Leaning against the wall by the stair-foot with her hands behind her, a way she'd had ever since she was a wee bit, the talk began, with no leading up to it on either side.

"Jock," she said, suddenly, and a quaint look came over her face, "I've never told you what made me ill at Mauchline."

"I've been waiting," I answered.

"It was a bad time for me," she continued.

"I know that, Lady-bird," said I.

"Part of me died," she said, and on this a thought flashed by me which, I have often held, that in some way her language expressed more than she knew.

"I've been filled up with conceit of myself," she went on, "and I got punished for it."

"There was never a woman living with less!" I cried, so sodden in my affection for her that I could not stand to hear her blamed, even by herself.

"Maybe I didn't show it," she said with a smile, "but I've always held, 'in to mysel',' that the gifted folk were G.o.d's aristocrats, and the day I told Danvers Carmichael and you my esteem of lords and t.i.tles and forbears I said just what I thought, though both of you laughed at me, for I reasoned that any one whom the Almighty took such special pains with must have the grand character as well. And so I made of all the people who write and paint and sing a great a.s.sembly, like Arthur's knights, who were over the earth righting wrongs and helping the weak.

Then came the Burns book; and there are no words to tell the glory of it to me. All the great thoughts I had dreamed were written there, and before the power of this man, who took the commonest things of life and wrote them out in letters of gold, I felt as one might before the G.o.ds.

It was of Burns I thought in my waking hours, and 'twas of him I dreamed by night; and I thanked G.o.d to be born in his country and his time, so that I might see one, from the people, who had, in its highest essence, the thing we call genius.

"But always, always," she interrupted, smiling, "with the conceit of myself which I mentioned before. Because G.o.d had given me a little gift, I believed that I was in some degree a chosen creature, a bit like the Burns man himself.

"The first time I talked with him at the inn I felt his power, his charm; but there was something in his ways to which I had never been accustomed in men--a certain freedom, which I put by, however, as one of the peculiarities of his gift.

"Well," she said, coming over and burying her face in my breast, "it took me but two weeks to discover that the thing we call genius has no more to do with a person's character than the chair he sits in; that a man can write like a G.o.d and live like the beasts in the fields. Can speak of Christian charity like the disciples of old, and hold the next person who offends him up to the ridicule of the whole paris.h.!.+ That he can write lines surpa.s.sing--aye!" she cried, "_surpa.s.sing_ Polonius's advice to his son, and leave them uncopied on an ale-house table to go off with the first loose woman who comes by, and be carried home, too drunk to walk, the next morning, roaring out hymns about eternal salvation.

"And after I met the Armour girl, and found the harm that Burns had brought to her, my idol fell from its clay feet, and I was alone in a strange country, with my G.o.ds gone, and my beliefs in shreds around me.

"But I have made my readjustments. I am humbled. I see how little value verse-making holds to the real task of living, and I am a better woman for what I have been through. I have learned--almost losing my mind over the lesson," she interjected, with her own bright smile--"the value of the solid virtues of life; and I've come to the conclusion that it is harder to be a gentleman than a genius. G.o.d makes one, but a man has the handling of the other upon himself. Danvers Carmichael,"

she continued, looking up at me, "is a gentleman. His word is his bond.

He considers others, respects woman and honors her; controls his nature, and has a code of conduct which he would rather die than break.

Ah!" she said, "I have had a bitter time; but it's taught me to appreciate that in the real things of life--the things for which we are here, love, home, and the rearing of children--genius has about as much part as the royal Bengal tiger. It's beautiful to look at, but dangerous to trifle with, and,"--here she smiled at her own earnestness for a second as she started up the stairs--"and here endeth the first lesson, my Lord of Stair!"

I was in no way sorry as to her conclusions about the value of verse-making, for I had seen that her continual mental excitement was sapping her vitality; and I closed my eyes to sleep that night with a feeling of grat.i.tude to my Heavenly Father that the Burns business was by with forever.

Toward noon of the next day I discovered my mistake. Smoking by the fire in the chimney corner of the hall, I heard a clattering of horses'

hoofs on the gravel outside, and from the window saw Danvers Carmichael throw the reins to his groom, run up the steps of the main entrance, and ask for Miss Stair in a voice strangely unlike his usual one. I knew that Nancy was sitting with some lace-work in her own writing-room, and hoped much from their meeting, and that her recent experience, which made her set a new value on Danvers, would bring about a more complete understanding between them.

"Ah, Dandy!" said Nancy, her voice having a ring of pleasure in it.

"When did you return from Glasgow?"

"Late yesterday," he answered. "I dined at the club in town and rode home about ten. I'm thinking of leaving Arran for a time," he said, coldly.

"Why didn't you stop?" she asked, with some surprise.

"I was in no mood for visiting last night."

"You were ill, or worried?" Nancy inquired anxiously.

"Worried, ill," he answered. "Ill, and ashamed, and miserable, in a way, please G.o.d, most men may never know."

"What is it, Dandy?" and I saw that at his vehemence she put her work on the table and moved toward him.

"Oh!" he cried out, "it's you! It's you! In the month before I went away I had to endure G.o.d only knows what bitterness because of you! And on my return last night I hear at the club that ye've been off in Ayrs.h.i.+re visiting Robert Burns! Did ye have a pleasant time?" he asked, glowering down at her from his great height, handsome and angrier than I had ever seen him before.

The tone rather than the words struck fire immediately, and Nancy's eyes took a peculiar significance, boding little good to the one with whom she was having dealings.

"Very pleasant," she answered, in a voice of ice, picking up her work and reseating herself.

"Before I went away," Danvers continued, "there was little in the way of humiliation which I had not endured at your hands! I've seen ye play fast and loose with half the men in Edinbro'--aye, in the whole of Scotland, it seems to me! I have heard your name coupled more often than I can tell with that of the greatest scoundrel in Scotland, and have held silence concerning it; and when things came to that pa.s.s that none could endure it and I struck him; how was the affair settled. By your sending for him!--for him!" he fairly screamed, "while I, your betrothed husband almost, was left in ignorance that ye knew of the matter at all.

"And at the time of the meeting in the Holm, what does the d.a.m.ned scoundrel do but come forth with his friends and apologize for his conduct with seeming generosity, naming the whole business the result of a crusty temper of his own, apologizing handsomely, and in a devilish open way, ending by saying:

"'One who is dear to me has shown me my faults, and I am doing her bidding, as well as fulfilling my own sense of justice, in asking your pardon!' And at the mention of you he took off his hat and spoke as one who performs an obligation to another who has a right to demand it.