Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume XXII Part 17

"Somewhere about the pineal; and therefore we say impudence is moral, sometimes immoral, as just now when you d.a.m.ned me. No more of your old junk, I say, sitting here in my cathedra, which by the way is spring-bottomed, which may account for my moral elasticity that a highwayman is a coward."

"Well," cried S----k, starting up. "I'll deposit a pound with W----pe, on a bet that you'll not take sixpence from the first b.u.mpkin we meet on the road, by the old watchword, 'Stand and deliver;' and you'll have the gun to boot."

"Ay, that's a physical bribe," cried W----pe; and, after pausing a little, "The fellow flinches."

"And surely the reverse must hold," added S----k, "that, being a coward, he must be a highwayman."

"Why, you see, gents," said S----th coolly, "I don't mind a very great deal, you know, though I do take said sixpence from said b.u.mpkin; but I won't do it, you know, on compulsion."

"If there's no compulsion, there's no robbery," said S----k.

"Oh, I mean _your_ compulsion. As for mine, exercised on said b.u.mpkin, let me alone for that part of the small affair; but none of your compulsion, if you love me. I can do anything, but not upon compulsion, you know."

"Done then!"

"Why, ye-e-s," drawled S----th, "done; I may say, gents, done; but I say with Sir John, don't misunderstand me, not upon compulsion, you know."

"Your own free will," shouted both the others, now pretty well to do in the world of dithyrambics. "Here's your instrument for extorting the sixpence by force or fear."

And this young man, half inebriated--with, we may here say parenthetically, a mother living in a garret in James' Square, with one son and an only daughter of a respectable though poor man, and who trusted to her son for being the means of her support--qualified, as we have seen, by high parts to extort from society respect, and we may add, though that has not appeared, to conciliate love and admiration--took willingly into his hand the old rusty "Innes," to perpetrate upon the highway a robbery. And would he do it? You had only to look upon his face for an instant to be certain that he would; for he had all the lineaments of a young man of indomitable courage and resolution--the steady eye, the firm lip, all under the high brows of intellect, nor unmixed with the beauty that belongs to these moral expressions which in the playfulness of the social hour he had been reducing to materialism, well knowing all the while that he was arguing for effect and applause from those who only gave him the return of stultified petulance. What if that mother and sister, who loved him, and wept day and night over the wild follies that consumed his energies and demoralized his heart, had seen him now!

The bill was paid by S----k, who happened to have money, and who gave it on the implied condition of a similar one for all on another occasion.

They went, or, as the phrase is often, sallied forth. The night had now come down with her black shadows. There was no moon. She was dispensing her favours among savages in another hemisphere, who, savages though they were, might have their devotions to their strange G.o.ds, resident with her up yonder, where no robbery is, save that of light from the pure fountain of heat and life. Yes, the darkness was auspicious to folly, as it often is to vice; and there was quietness too--no winds abroad to speak voices through rustling leaves, to terrify the criminal from his wild rebellion against the peace of nature. No night could have suited them better. Yes, all was favourable but G.o.d; and Him these wild youths had offended, as disobedient sons of poor parents, who had educated them well--as rebellious citizens among a society which would have hailed them as ornaments--as despisers of G.o.d's temple, where grace was held out to them and spurned.

They were now upon the low road leading parallel to the beach, and towards the end of Inverleith Row. Nor had the devil left them with the deserted toddy-bowl. There was still pride for S----th, and for the others the rankling sense of inferiority in talent and of injury from scorching irony. Nor had they proceeded two miles, till the fatal opportunity loomed in the dark, in the form of a figure coming up from Leith or Edinburgh.

Now, S----th; Now, the cowardly Cartouche; Now, the poltroon Rob Roy; Now, the braggart Wallace!

But S----th did not need the taunts, nor, though many a patriotic cause wanted such a youth, was he left for other work, that night of devil-worship. The figure approached. Alas! the work so easy. S----th was right; how easy and cowardly, where the stranger was, in the confidence of his own heart, unprepared, unweaponed! Yet those who urged him on leapt a d.y.k.e.

"Stand and deliver!" said S----th, with a handkerchief over his face.

"G.o.d help me!" cried the man, in a fit of newborn fear. "I'm a father, have wife and bairns; but I canna spare my life to a highwayman. Here, here, here."

And fumbling nervously in his pocket, and shaking all over, not at all like the old object of similitude, but rather like a branch of a tree driven by the wind, he thrust something into S----th's hand, and rushing past him, was off on the road homewards. Nor was it a quick walk under fear, but a run, as if he thought he was or would be pursued for his life, or brought down by the long range of the gun he had seen in the hands of the robber.

Yes, it was easily done, and it was done; but how to be undone at a time when the craving maw of the noose dangled from the post, in obedience to the Procrustes of the time!

And S----th felt it was done. His hand still held what the man had pushed into it, but by-and-by it was as fire. His brain reeled; he staggered, and would have fallen, but for S----k, who, leaping the d.y.k.e, came behind him.

"What luck?"

"This," said S----th,--"the price of my life," throwing on the ground the paper roll.

"Pound-notes," cried S----k, taking them up. "One, two, three, four, five; more than sixpence."

"Where is the man?" cried S----th, as, seizing the notes from the hands of S----k, he turned round. Then, throwing down the gun, he set off after his victim; but the latter was now ahead, though his pursuer heard the clatter of his heavy shoes on the metal road.

"Ho, there! stop! 'twas a joke--a bet."

No answer, and couldn't be. The man naturally thought the halloo was for further compulsion, under the idea that he had more to give, and on he sped with increased celerity and terror; nor is it supposed that he stopt till he got to his own house, a mile beyond Davidson's Mains.

Smith gave up the pursuit, and with the notes in his hand, ready to be cast away at every exacerbation of his fear, returned to his cowardly companions with hanging head and, if they had seen, with eyes rolling, as if he did not know where to look or what to do.

"What is to be done?" he cried; and his fears shook the others.

"Yes, what is to be done? You urged me on. Try to help me out. Let us go back and seek out this man. To-morrow it may be too late, when the police have had this robbery in their hands as a thing intended."

"We could not find the man though we went back," said S----k. And his companions agreed.

But W----pe, who had some acquaintanceship with the police Captain Stewart, proposed that they should proceed homewards, go to him, give him the money, and tell the story out.

"That, I fear, would be putting one's hand in the mouth of the hyaena at the moment he is laughing with hunger, as they say he does."

An opinion which S----th feared was too well founded. Nearly at their wits' end, they stood all three for a little quite silent, till the sound of a horse's clattering feet sounded as if coming from Davidson's Mains. All under the conviction of crime, they became alarmed; and as the rider approached, they concealed themselves behind the d.y.k.e, which ran by the side of the road. At that moment a man came as if from Edinburgh, and they could hear the rider, who did not, from his voice, appear to be the man who had been robbed, inquiring if he had met a young man with a gun in his hand. The man answered no, and off set the rider towards town at the rate of a hard trot. The few hopeful moments when anything could have been done effectually as a palinode and expiation were past; and S----th, releaping the d.y.k.e, was again upon the road in the depth of despair, and his companions scarcely less so.

All his and their escapades had hitherto been at least within the bounds of the law; and though his heart had often misgiven him, when called upon for the nourishment of his wild humours, as he thought of his widowed mother at home, without the comfort of the son she loved in spite of his errors, he had not ever yet felt the pangs of deep regret as they came preluding amendment. A terrible influx of feelings, which had been acc.u.mulating almost unknown to him during months and months--for his father had been dead only for a year and a half--pushed up against all the strainings of a wild natural temperament, and seemed ready to choke him, depriving him of utterance, and making him appear the very coward he had been depicting so sharply an hour before. A deep gloom fell over him; nor was this rendered less insp.i.s.sated by the recollection that came quick as lightning, that he was the only one known to the mistress of the inn. And now, worse and worse--for the same power that sent him that conviction threw a suspicion over his mind which made him strike his forehead with an energy alarming to his companions--no other--"O, merciful G.o.d!" he muttered--than that the man he had robbed was his maternal uncle; the only man among the friends of either his father or his mother who had shown any sympathy to the bereaved family, who had fed them and kept them from starvation, and by whom he had been himself nourished. He had no power to speak this: it was one of those thoughts that scathe the nerves that serve the tongue, and which flit and burn, and will not ameliorate their fierceness by the common means given to man in mercy. It now appeared to him as something miraculous why he did not recognise him; but the occasion was one of hurry and confusion, and so completely oblivious had he been in the agony which came on him in an instant, that he even thought that at the very moment he knew him, looking darkly, as he did, through the handkerchief over his eyes. In his despair, he meditated hurrying to Leith, and with the five pounds getting a pa.s.sage over the sea somewhere, it signified nothing where, if away from the scene of his crime and ingrat.i.tude; and this resolution was confirmed by the additional thought that Mr. Henderson, however good and generous, was a stern man--so stern, that he had ten years before given up a beloved son into the hands of justice for stealing; yea, stern _ex corde_ as Cato, if generous _ex crumena_ as Codrus.

This resolution for a time brought back his love of freedom and adventure. He would go to Hudson's Bay, and shoot bears or set traps for wild silver-foxes, that would bring him gold; or to Buenos Ayres, and catch the wild horse with the la.s.so; or to Lima, and become a soldier of fortune, and slay men with the sword. The gleam of wild hope was shortlived--his triumph over his present ill a temporary hallucination.

The laurel is the only tree which burns and crackles when green. The intention fled, as once more the thought of his mother came, with that vigour which was only of half an hour's birth, and begotten by young conscience on old neglect. They had been trailing their legs along till they came to Inverleith Row, where he behoved to have left his companions, if his resolution lasted; for the road there goes straight on to Leith Harbour. He hesitated, and made an effort; but S----k, who knew him, and fancied from the wild look of his eye that he meditated throwing himself into the deep harbour of Leith, took him by an arm, motioning to W----pe to take the other, and thus by a very small effort--for really his resolution had departed, and his mind, so far as his intention went, was gone--they half forced him up the long row. When they arrived at Canonmills, here is the rider again, hurrying on: he had executed his commission, whatever it was, and was galloping home. But the moment he came forward, he pulled up. He had, by a glance under the light of a lamp, caught a sight of the gun in the hands of S----k, who had carried it when he took S----th's arm. The man shouted to a policeman,

"Seize that robber!"

"Which of them?"

"Him with the gun."

And in an instant the cowardly dog who had done the whole business was laid hold of.

"The gun is mine," cried S----th. "It is I who am answerable for whatever was done by him who carried that weapon. Take me, and let the innocent off. I say this young man is innocent."

"Very gallant and n.o.ble," said the man; "but when we go to the hills, we like the deer that bears the horns."

"We are up to them tricks," said the policeman. And S----k is borne along, with courage, if he ever had any, gone, and his eye looking terror.

S----th wanted to go along with him; but W----pe seized him by the arm again and dragged him up by the east side of Huntly Street, whereby they could get easily to James' Square.

In a few minutes more S----th was at his mother's door with the burning five pounds in his pocket. He had meditated throwing it away, but the hurrying concourse of thoughts had prevented the insufficient remedy from being carried into effect. When he opened the door he found his mother alone. The sister had not yet come from the warehouse where she earned five shillings a week, almost the only source of her and the mother's living; for the money which S----th earned as a mere copying clerk in a writer's office, went mostly in some other direction. The mother soon observed, as she cast her eye over him, that there was something more than ordinary out of even his irregular way. He was pale, woe-worn, haggard; nor did he seem able to stand, but hurried to a chair and flung himself down, uttering confusedly, "Something to drink, mother----whisky."

"I hae nane, Charlie, lad," said she. "Never hae I pa.s.sed a day like this since your father died. I have na e'en got the bit meat that a' get that are under G.o.d's protection. But what ails ye, dear Charlie?"

"Never mind me," replied the youth in choking accents. "I am better.

Starving, starving! O G.o.d! and my doing. Yes, I am better--a bitter cure--starving," he again muttered; and searching his pockets, and throwing the five pounds on the table--"There, there, there," he added.

The mother took up the notes, and counted them slowly; for she had been inured to grief, and was always calm, even when her heart beat fast with the throbs of anguish.

"And whaur fae, laddie?" she said, as she turned her grey eye and scanned deeply the pale face of her son.

Silent, even dogged! Where now his metaphysics, his gibes on the physicalities, the moralities, the spiritualities?--all bundled up in a vibrating chord.