Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume XXII Part 21

"About twelve months after our marriage, Heaven (as authors say) blest our loves with a son and, I had almost said, heir. Deplorable patrimony!--heir of his mother's features--the sacrifice of his father's weakness." Kean could not have touched this last burst. The father, the miserable man, parental affection, agony, remorse, repentance, were expressed in a moment.

A tear was hurrying down his withered cheek as he dashed it away with his dripping sleeve. "I am a weak old fool," said he, endeavouring to smile; for there was a volatile gaiety in his disposition, which his sorrows had subdued, but not extinguished. "Yet, my boy! my poor dear Willie!--I shall never--no, I shall never see him again!" Here he again wept; and had nature not denied me that luxury, I should have wept too, for the sake of company. After a pause, he again proceeded:--

"After the birth of my child, came the baptism. I had no conscientious objection to the tenets of the Established Church of my country; but I belonged to no religious community. I had never thought of it as an obligation beyond that of custom, and deferred it from year to year, till I felt ashamed to 'go forward' on account of my age. My wife was a Cameronian; and to them, though I knew nothing of their principles, I had an aversion. But for her to hold up the child while I was in the place, was worse than heathenism--was unheard-of in the parish. The nearest Episcopal chapel was at Kelso, a distance of ten miles. The child still remained unbaptized. 'It hasna a name yet,' said the ignorant meddlers, who had no higher idea of the ordinance. It was a source of much uneasiness to my wife, and gave rise to some family quarrelling. Months succeeded weeks, and eventually the child was carried to the Episcopal church. This choked up all the slander of the town, and directed it into one channel upon my devoted head. Some said I 'wasna sound,' and all agreed I 'was nae better than I should be,' while the zealous clergyman came to my father, expressing his fears that 'his son was in a bad way.' For this, too, am I indebted to procrastination.

I thus became a martyr to supposed opinions, of which I was ignorant; and such was the unchristian bigotry of my neighbours, that, deeming it sinful to employ one whom they considered little other than a pagan, about five years after my marriage I was compelled to remove with my family to London.

"We were at this period what tradesmen term _miserably hard up_. Having sold off our little stock of furniture, after discharging a few debts which were unavoidably contracted, a balance of rather less than two pounds remained; and upon this, my wife, my child, and myself were to travel a distance of three hundred and fifty miles. I will not go over the journey: we performed it on foot in twenty days; and, including lodging, our daily expense amounted to one s.h.i.+lling and eightpence; so that, on entering the metropolis, all we possessed was five s.h.i.+llings and a few pence. It was the dead of winter, and nearly dark, when we were pa.s.sing down St. John Street, Clerkenwell. I was benumbed, my wife was fainting, and our poor child was blue and speechless. We entered a public-house near Smithfield, where two pints of warm porter and ginger, with a crust of bread and cheese, operated as partial restoratives. The noisy scene of butchers, drovers, and coal-heavers was new to me. My child was afraid, my wife uncomfortable, and I, a gaping observer, forgetful of my own situation. My boy pulled my coat, and said, 'Come, father;' my wife jogged my elbow, and reminded me of a lodging; but my old reply, '_Stop a little_,' was my ninety and nine times repeated answer. Frequently the landlord made a long neck over the table, gauging the contents of our tardily emptied pint; and, as the watchman was calling 'Past eleven,' finally took it away, and bade us 'bundle off.'

Now I arose, feeling at once the pride of my spirit and the poorness of my purse, vowing never to darken his door again, should I remain in London a hundred years.

"On reaching the street, I inquired at a half-grown boy where we might obtain a lodging; and after causing me to inquire twice or thrice--'I no ken, Sawney--haud awa' north,' said the brat, sarcastically imitating my accent. I next inquired of a watchman, who said there was no place upon his beat; but _beat_ was Gaelic to me; and I repeated my inquiry to another, who directed me towards the h.e.l.ls of Saffron Hill. At a third, I requested to be informed the way, who, after abusing me for seeking lodgings at such an hour, said he had seen me in the town six hours before, and bade us go to the devil. A fourth inquired if we had any money, took us to the bar of a public-house, called for a quartern of gin, drank our healths, asked if we could obtain a bed, which being answered in the negative, he hurried to the door, bawling 'Half-past eleven,' and left me to pay for the liquor. On reaching Saffron Hill, it was in an Irish uproar: policemen, thieves, prost.i.tutes, and Israelites were brawling in a satanic ma.s.s of iniquity; blood and murder was the order of the night. My child screamed, my wife clung to my arm; she would not, she durst not, sleep in such a place. To be brief: we had to wander in the streets till the morning; and I believe that night, aided by a broken heart, was the forerunner of her death. It was the first time I had been compelled to walk trembling for a night without shelter, or to sit frozen on a threshold; and this, too, I owe to procrastination.

"For a time we rented a miserable garret, without furniture or fixture, at a s.h.i.+lling weekly, which was paid in advance. I had delayed making application for employment till our last sixpence was spent. We had pa.s.sed a day without food; my child appeared dying; my wife said nothing, but she gazed upon her dear boy, and shook her head with an expression that wrung me to the soul. I rushed out almost in madness, and, in a state of unconsciousness, hurried from shop to shop in agitation and in misery. It was vain; appearances were against me. I was broken down and dejected, and my state of mind and manner appeared a compound of the maniac and the blackguard. At night I was compelled to return to the suffering victims of my propensity, penniless and unsuccessful. It was a dreadful and a sleepless night with us all; or if I did slumber upon the hard floor for a moment (for we had neither seat nor covering), it was to startle at the cries of my child wailing for hunger, or the smothered sighs of my unhappy partner. Again and again I almost thought them the voice of the Judge, saying, 'Depart from me, ye cursed.'

"I again hurried out with daybreak, for I was wretched, and resumed my inquiries; but night came, and I again returned equally successful. The yearnings of my child were now terrible, and the streaming eyes of his fond mother, as she pressed his head with her cold hand upon her lap, alone distinguished her from death. The pains of hunger in myself were becoming insupportable; my teeth gnashed against each other, and worms seemed gnawing my heartstrings. At this moment, my dear wife looked me in the face, and, stretching her hand to me, said, 'Farewell, my love, in a few hours I and our dear child shall be at rest! Oh! hunger, hunger!' I could stand no more. Reason forsook me. I could have died for them; but I could not beg. We had nothing to pledge. Our united wearing apparel would not have brought a s.h.i.+lling. My wife had a pair of pocket Bibles (I had once given them in a present): my eyes fell upon them--I s.n.a.t.c.hed them up un.o.bserved--rushed from the house, and--Oh heaven! let the cause forgive the act--p.a.w.ned them for eighteenpence. It saved our lives, it obtained employment, and for a few weeks appeared to overcome my curse.

"I am afraid I grow tedious with particulars, sir; it is an old man's fault--though I am not old either; I am scarce fifty-five. After being three years in London, I was appointed foreman of an extensive establishment in the Strand. I remained in this situation about four years. It was one of respectability and trust, demanding, hourly, a vigilant and undivided attention. To another, it might have been attended with honour and profit; but to me it terminated in disgrace.

Amongst other duties, I had the payment of the journeymen, and the giving out of the work. They being numerous, and their demands frequent, it would have required a clerk for the proper discharge of that duty alone. I delayed entering at the moment in my books the materials and cash given to each, until they, multiplying upon my hands, and begetting a consequent confusion, it became impossible for me to make their entry with certainty or correctness. The workmen were not slow in discovering this, and not a few of the more profligate improved upon it to their advantage. Thus I frequently found it impossible to make both ends of my account meet; and in repeated instances, where the week's expenditure exceeded the general average, though satisfied in my own mind of its accuracy, from my inability to state the particulars, in order to conceal my infirmity, I have accounted for the overplus from my own pocket. Matters went on in this way for a considerable time. You will admit I was rendered feelingly sensible of my error, and I resolved to correct it. But my resolutions were always made of paper; they were like a complaisant debtor--full of promises, praying for grace, and dexterously evading performance. Thus, day after day, I deferred the adoption of my new system to a future period. For, sir, you must be aware there is a pleasure in procrastination, of a nature the most alluring and destructive; but it is a pleasure purchased by the sacrifice of judgment: in its nature and results it resembles the happiness of the drunkard; for, in exact ratio as our spirits are raised above their proper level, in the same proportion, when the ardent effects have evaporated, they sink beneath that level.

"I was now too proud to work as a mere journeyman, and I commenced business for myself; but I began without capital, and a gourd of sorrow hung over me, while I stood upon sand. I had some credit; but, as my bills became payable, I ever found I had put off, till the very day they became due, the means of liquidating them; then had I to run and borrow five pounds from one, and five s.h.i.+llings from another, urged by despair, from a hundred quarters. My creditors grew clamorous; my wife upbraided me; I flew to the bottle--to the bottle!" he repeated; "and my ruin was complete--my family, business, everything, was neglected. Bills of Middles.e.x were served on me, declarations filed; I surrendered myself, and was locked up in Whitecross Street. It is a horrid place; the Fleet is a palace to it; the Bench, paradise! But, sir, I will draw my painful story to a close. During my imprisonment my wife died--died, not by my hands, but from the work of them! She was laid in a strange grave, and strangers laid her head in the dust, while I lay a prisoner in the city where she was buried. My boy--my poor Willie--who had been always neglected, was left without father and without mother! Sir! sir! my boy was left without food! He forsook visiting me in the prison; I heard he had turned the a.s.sociate of thieves; and from that period five years have pa.s.sed, and I have obtained no trace of him. But it is my doing--my poor Willie!"

Here the victim of procrastination finished his narrative. The storm had pa.s.sed away, and the sun again shone out. The man had interested me, and we left the gardens together. I mentioned that I had to go into the city; he said he had business there also, and asked to accompany me. I could not refuse him. From the door by which we left the gardens, our route lay by way of Oxford Street. As we proceeded down Holborn, the church bell of St. Sepulchre's began to toll; and the crowd, collected round the top of Newgate Street, indicated an execution. As we approached the place, the criminal was brought forth. He was a young man about nineteen years of age, and had been found guilty of an aggravated case of housebreaking. As the unhappy being turned round to look upon the spectators, my companion gave a convulsive shriek, and, springing from my side, exclaimed, "Righteous Heaven! my Willie! my murdered Willie!" He had proceeded but a few paces, when he fell with his face upon the ground. In the wretched criminal he discovered his lost, his only son. The miserable old man was conveyed, in a state of insensibility, to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, where I visited him the next day: he seemed to suffer much, and in a few hours he died with a shudder, and the word _procrastination_ on his tongue.

THE TEN OF DIAMONDS.

At length I reached the Moated Grange, on a visit to my friend Graeme.

But since I am to speak a good deal of this place, I may as well explain that it was misnamed. There was no moat, nor had there been for a hundred years; but round the old pile--h.o.a.ry, and shrivelled, and palsied enough, in all conscience, for delighting the mole-eye of any antiquarian hunks--- there was a visible trace of the old ditch in a hollow covered with green sward going all round the house, which hollow was the only place clear of trees. And these trees! They stood for a mile round, like an army of giants seventy feet high, all intent, it would seem, upon choking the poor old pile, throwing their big arms over the hollow, swinging them to and fro, and das.h.i.+ng their points against the panes as the wind listed. It would come by-and-by to be a hard task for the stone and lime victim to hold its place, with its sinews of run mortar, against these tyrants of the wood. And then they were as full of noises as Babel itself--noises a thousand times more heterogeneous--croaking, chirping, screeching, cawing, whistling, billing, cooing, cuckooing. "What a place to live in!" I thought, fresh as I was from town, "where, if there are noises, one knows something of their meaning--maledictory, yea, devilish as it often is, expressive of the pa.s.sions of men which will never sleep. But these! what could one make of such a _tintamarre_? Nothing but the reflection--that is, if you happen to be a philosopher, which, thank G.o.d, I am not--that not one note of all this rural oratorio is without its intention; and thus we always satisfy ourselves. But when we run the matter up a little further, we find it a very small affair: two responses, one to each of two chords vibrating for ever and ever throughout all nature--pleasure and pain, pain and pleasure, turn by turn--the last pain being death!"

"How can you live here, Graeme?" I said, as we stood under the old porch, looking out, or rather having our look blocked up by the thickness, and our ears deaved by the eternal screeching and cawing of five thousand crows overhead.

"There's gloom everywhere where man is," he replied, "and screeching owls in every brain. You can't get quit." Then, lowering his voice, "I am haunted, and yet live here in this Moated Grange! The difference is this: in the town the gaslight and eternal clatter distract a man like me who is plagued from within; here I find some concord between the inside and the out, only the owls in the inside are more grotesque and horrible."

"Well, Graeme," said I, "it is needless to disguise what brought me here. The secret is out. The choke-damp has got wind. If the idiot had not blown his brains out, it would have been nothing. You could have paid him back, and he might now have had both his money and his brains."

"Got wind!" cried he, clutching me by the breast of the coat with the fury of a highwayman or a spasmodic actor. "Did the villain Ruggieri tell you?"

"No."

"So far well," he added, taking a long pull with his lungs, as if he had got quit of an attack of asthma; "but though I may satisfy the widow, how am I to appease Heaven? Come," he added, again seizing me with a force in which there was a tremble, "I want to ease my mind. You are my oldest friend, and a load divided is more easily carried."

And leading the way into the parlour, where the fire had got into a fine red heat, and was sending a glare through the ruby and golden contents of several strangely-shaped bottles on the table, he threw himself on a chair on the one side, I taking one on the other. A few minutes of silence intervened.

"If it be as painful for you," he continued, "to hear a confession as it is for me to make it, you may help yourself to bear the infliction by pouring into your stomach some of that Burgundy. I will take none. I have fire enough in my brain already;" and he pushed the bottle to me.

"You were a bit of a blackleg yourself," he continued, as he threw himself back in the arm-chair, and compressed his chest with his folded arms till the blood seemed to mount to his face. "You were present at that game where I took the five thousand by a trick from Gourlay. You know, as a gambler yourself, that all the tribe are by const.i.tution cheats. It is folly to speak of an honest gambler. The pa.s.sion is a ten thousand times distilled selfishness, with no qualm of obligation to G.o.d or religion to keep it in check--only a little fear of that bugbear, society. Our club at the 'Red Lion' all knew this in our souls; but every one of us knew also that the moment he would be discovered cheating, he would be scorched with our hatred and contempt. He must leave our pure society on the instant--not of course that he was any worse than the rest of us, but only that he was unfortunate in being discovered. That night Gourlay and I were demons. We had baffled each other, and drank till our brains seethed, though our countenances and speech betrayed nothing but the extreme of coolness. He had won a thousand of me, and hounded me from post to pillar, offering to be cleared out by my _skill_, as he called it sneeringly. The fellow, in short, hated me, because the year before, at Baden-Baden, I had taken two thousand out of him, and would not give him his revenge."

"He must have thought you honest," said I; "otherwise he would not have thus badgered you to play."

"No; he had not the generosity to think me honest. I repeat, no gambler ever thinks another gambler honest, and he lies when he says so. He knew himself to be a rogue, and thought it diamond in the teeth of diamond;"

and, pausing and meditating, he repeated the word, "diamond--diamond--diamond."

I looked at him in surprise. He continued to keep up the cuckoo sound, trying to laugh, and yet totally unable to accomplish even a cackle, as if some internal force clutched the diaphragm and mocked him, so that his efforts were reduced to a gurgling as in cynanche--like a dog choking with a rope round his craig, the sounds coming jerking out in barks, and dying away again in yelps and whines.

"You will know presently why that word produces these strange effects upon me," he at length contrived to be able to say. "Nor less the form of the figure as painted in these h.e.l.l-books. It is blazoned everywhere.

The devil wears it in fiery lines on his face as he hounds me a-nights through these thick woods. Yet I am not afraid of it--rather court it, as if I yearned for the burning pain of its red signature in, and in, and in to my brain, as far as thought goes."

"Have you got mad, Graeme?" I e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed. "What has the figure of a diamond, or of ten diamonds----"

"_Ten_, you would say?" he immediately cried, as he started up, and immediately threw himself down; "_the_ ten, if you dared. You are commissioned by the powers yonder--you, you, too, along with the others, including the devil."

"I have no wish to be in the same commission with that great personage,"

said I, with a very poor attempt to laugh, for I felt anxious about my friend. "I gave him up when I threw his books into the fire, and swore never more to touch the unhallowed thing."

I perceived that my attempt at humour increased his excitement. "Repeat the words," he cried. "Say 'the ten of diamonds' right out with open mouth, and repeat them a thousand times, so as to give me ear-proof that the powers yonder," pointing to the roof, "are against me."

At this moment the door of the parlour was opened by some timid hand.

"Come hither, my pretty Edith," he said, in a calmer voice, as a little cherub-looking child, with a head so like as if, after the fas.h.i.+on of Danae's, it had been powdered by Jupiter with gold dust, and a pair of blue eyes, as if the said G.o.d, in making them, had tried to emulate the wing of the Halcyon in a human orb, and intended, moreover, the light thereof to calm the storm in those of her father.

And so it did, to a certain extent; for Edith got upon his knee, and, putting her arms round his neck, kept peering with those eyes into the very pupils of her father's, till the light of innocence, softening the rigid nerve, enabled them to regain somewhat of their natural l.u.s.tre.

"What did Trott, the crazy girl who spaes fortunes, give you, Edith?"

and coruscations began again to mix with the softer light.

"A card," replied the girl, as she undid her embrace, and, casting her head to a side, viewed him timidly.

"She has been frightened," thought I, "by some consequences resulting from the same question put at some former time."

"And what was the name of the card?" he continued.

But the girl was now on her guard. She hesitated, and struggled to get away.

"Tell this gentleman, then."

"The ten of diamonds," cried she; and no sooner were the words out than she fled, like a beam of light chased by the shadow of a tombstone.

"You see how it is," continued Graeme, getting into his former expression: "through this channel, this innocent medium, this creature the fruit of my loins, the idol of my heart, is the lightning of reproof hurled. A wandering idiot is prompted by the very inspiration of her imbecility to put into the hands of my child the emblem of my wickedness, that she in her love might place it before my eyes, there to develop the sin-print in the dark camera of my mind. No wonder she is alarmed at the mention of the words, for she read the horror produced in me when she held up what she called the pretty picture in my face. But, thank G.o.d! thank G.o.d!"----

And he fell for a moment into meditation.

"For what?" said I, as my wonder increased.

"That her mother, who is within a week of her confinement, knows nothing of this mystery."

I was silent. I might have said, "What mystery?" but I would only have irritated him.