And then the figure he made, with his decent portliness, his whiskers, the money in his purse, the excellent cigar that he now lighted, recurred to his mind in consolatory comparison with that of a certain maddened lad who, on a certain spring Sunday ten years before, and in the hour of church-time silence, had stolen from that city by the Glasgow road. In the face of these changes, it were impious to doubt fortunes kindness. All would be well yet; the Mackenzies would be found, Flora, younger and lovelier and kinder than before; Alan would be found, and would have so nicely discriminated his behaviour as to have grown, on the one hand, into a valued friend of Mr. Nicholsons, and to have remained, upon the other, of that exact shade of joviality which John desired in his companions. And so, once more, John fell to work discounting the delightful future: his first appearance in the family pew; his first visit to his uncle Greig, who thought himself so great a financier, and on whose purblind Edinburgh eyes John was to let in the dazzling daylight of the West; and the details in general of that unrivalled transformation scene, in which he was to display to all Edinburgh a portly and successful gentleman in the shoes of the derided fugitive.
The time began to draw near when his father would have returned from the office, and it would be the prodigals cue to enter. He strolled westward by Albany Street, facing the sunset embers, pleased, he knew not why, to move in that cold air and indigo twilight, starred with street-lamps. But there was one more disenchantment waiting him by the way.
At the corner of Pitt Street he paused to light a fresh cigar; the vesta threw, as he did so, a strong light upon his features, and a man of about his own age stopped at sight of it.
I think your name must be Nicholson, said the stranger.
It was too late to avoid recognition; and besides, as John was now actually on the way home, it hardly mattered, and he gave way to the impulse of his nature.
Great Scott! he cried, Beatson! and shook hands with warmth. It scarce seemed he was repaid in kind.
So youre home again? said Beatson. Where have you been all this long time?
In the States, said John California. Ive made my pile though; and it suddenly struck me it would be a noble scheme to come home for Christmas.
I see, said Beatson. Well, I hope well see something of you now youre here.
Oh, I guess so, said John, a little frozen.
Well, ta-ta, concluded Beatson, and he shook hands again and went.
This was a cruel first experience. It was idle to blink facts: here was John home again, and Beatson Old Beatson did not care a rush. He recalled Old Beatson in the past that merry and affectionate lad and their joint adventures and mishaps, the window they had broken with a catapult in India Place, the escalade of the castle rock, and many another inestimable bond of friendship; and his hurt surprise grew deeper. Well, after all, it was only on a mans own family that he could count; blood was thicker than water, he remembered; and the net result of this encounter was to bring him to the doorstep of his fathers house, with tenderer and softer feelings.
The night had come; the fanlight over the door shone bright; the two windows of the dining-room where the cloth was being laid, and the three windows of the drawing-room where Maria would be waiting dinner, glowed softlier through yellow blinds. It was like a vision of the past. All this time of his absence life had gone forward with an equal foot, and the fires and the gas had been lighted, and the meals spread, at the accustomed hours. At the accustomed hour, too, the bell had sounded thrice to call the family to worship. And at the thought, a pang of regret for his demerit seized him; he remembered the things that were good and that he had neglected, and the things that were evil and that he had loved; and it was with a prayer upon his lips that he mounted the steps and thrust the key into the key-hole.
He stepped into the lighted hall, shut the door softly behind him, and stood there fixed in wonder. No surprise of strangeness could equal the surprise of that complete familiarity. There was the bust of Chalmers near the stair-railings, there was the clothes-brush in the accustomed place; and there, on the hat-stand, hung hats and coats that must surely be the same as he remembered. Ten years dropped from his life, as a pin may slip between the fingers; and the ocean and the mountains, and the mines, and crowded marts and mingled races of San Francisco, and his own fortune and his own disgrace, became, for that one moment, the figures of a dream that was over.
He took off his hat, and moved mechanically toward the stand; and there he found a small change that was a great one to him. The pin that had been his from boyhood, where he had flung his balmoral when he loitered home from the Academy, and his first hat when he came briskly back from college or the office his pin was occupied. They might have at least respected my pin! he thought, and he was moved as by a slight, and began at once to recollect that he was here an interloper, in a strange house, which he had entered almost by a burglary, and where at any moment he might be scandalously challenged.
He moved at once, his hat still in his hand, to the door of his fathers room, opened it, and entered. Mr. Nicholson sat in the same place and posture as on that last Sunday morning; only he was older, and greyer, and sterner; and as he now glanced up and caught the eye of his son, a strange commotion and a dark flush sprung into his face.
Father, said John, steadily, and even cheerfully, for this was a moment against which he was long ago prepared, father, here I am, and here is the money that I took from you. I have come back to ask your forgiveness, and to stay Christmas with you and the children.
Keep your money, said the father, and go!
Father! cried John; for Gods sake dont receive me this way. Ive come for
Understand me, interrupted Mr. Nicholson; you are no son of mine; and in the sight of God, I wash my hands of you. One last thing I will tell you; one warning I will give you; all is discovered, and you are being hunted for your crimes; if you are still at large it is thanks to me; but I have done all that I mean to do; and from this time forth I would not raise one finger not one finger to save you from the gallows! And now, with a low voice of absolute authority, and a single weighty gesture of the finger, and now go!
CHAPTER VI THE HOUSE AT MURRAYFIELD
How John passed the evening, in what windy confusion of mind, in what squalls of anger and lulls of sick collapse, in what pacing of streets and plunging into public-houses, it would profit little to relate. His misery, if it were not progressive, yet tended in no way to diminish; for in proportion as grief and indignation abated, fear began to take their place. At first, his fathers menacing words lay by in some safe drawer of memory, biding their hour. At first, John was all thwarted affection and blighted hope; next bludgeoned vanity raised its head again, with twenty mortal gashes: and the father was disowned even as he had disowned the son. What was this regular course of life, that John should have admired it? what were these clock-work virtues, from which love was absent? Kindness was the test, kindness the aim and soul; and judged by such a standard, the discarded prodigal now rapidly drowning his sorrows and his reason in successive drams was a creature of a lovelier morality than his self-righteous father. Yes, he was the better man; he felt it, glowed with the consciousness, and entering a public-house at the corner of Howard Place (whither he had somehow wandered) he pledged his own virtues in a glass perhaps the fourth since his dismissal. Of that he knew nothing, keeping no account of what he did or where he went; and in the general crashing hurry of his nerves, unconscious of the approach of intoxication. Indeed, it is a question whether he were really growing intoxicated, or whether at first the spirits did not even sober him. For it was even as he drained this last glass that his fathers ambiguous and menacing words popping from their hiding-place in memory startled him like a hand laid upon his shoulder. Crimes, hunted, the gallows. They were ugly words; in the ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the uglier; for if some judicial error were in act against him, who should set a limit to its grossness or to how far it might be pushed? Not John, indeed; he was no believer in the powers of innocence, his cursed experience pointing in quite other ways; and his fears, once wakened, grew with every hour and hunted him about the city streets.
It was, perhaps, nearly nine at night; he had eaten nothing since lunch, he had drunk a good deal, and he was exhausted by emotion, when the thought of Houston came into his head. He turned, not merely to the man as a friend, but to his house as a place of refuge. The danger that threatened him was still so vague that he knew neither what to fear nor where he might expect it; but this much at least seemed undeniable, that a private house was safer than a public inn. Moved by these counsels, he turned at once to the Caledonian Station, passed (not without alarm) into the bright lights of the approach, redeemed his portmanteau from the cloak-room, and was soon whirling in a cab along the Glasgow Road. The change of movement and position, the sight of the lamps twinkling to the rear, and the smell of damp and mould and rotten straw which clung about the vehicle, wrought in him strange alternations of lucidity and mortal giddiness.
I have been drinking, he discovered; I must go straight to bed, and sleep. And he thanked Heaven for the drowsiness that came upon his mind in waves.
From one of these spells he was wakened by the stoppage of the cab; and, getting down, found himself in quite a country road, the last lamp of the suburb shining some way below, and the high walls of a garden rising before him in the dark. The Lodge (as the place was named), stood, indeed, very solitary. To the south it adjoined another house, but standing in so large a garden as to be well out of cry; on all other sides, open fields stretched upward to the woods of Corstorphine Hill, or backward to the dells of Ravelston, or downward toward the valley of the Leith. The effect of seclusion was aided by the great height of the garden walls, which were, indeed, conventual, and, as John had tested in former days, defied the climbing schoolboy. The lamp of the cab threw a gleam upon the door and the not brilliant handle of the bell.
Shall I ring for ye? said the cabman, who had descended from his perch, and was slapping his chest, for the night was bitter.
I wish you would, said John, putting his hand to his brow in one of his accesses of giddiness.
The man pulled at the handle, and the clanking of the bell replied from further in the garden; twice and thrice he did it, with sufficient intervals; in the great frosty silence of the night the sounds fell sharp and small.
Does he expect ye? asked the driver, with that manner of familiar interest that well became his port-wine face; and when John had told him no, Well, then, said the cabman, if yell tak my advice of it, well just gang back. And thats disinterested, mind ye, for my stables are in the Glesgie Road.
The servants must hear, said John.
Hout! said the driver. He keeps no servants here, man. Theyre a in the town house; I drive him often; its just a kind of a hermitage, this.
Give me the bell, said John; and he plucked at it like a man desperate.
The clamour had not yet subsided before they heard steps upon the gravel, and a voice of singular nervous irritability cried to them through the door, Who are you, and what do you want?
Alan, said John, its me its Fatty John, you know. Im just come home, and Ive come to stay with you.
There was no reply for a moment, and then the door was opened.
Get the portmanteau down, said John to the driver.
Do nothing of the kind, said Alan; and then to John, Come in here a moment. I want to speak to you.
John entered the garden, and the door was closed behind him. A candle stood on the gravel walk, winking a little in the draughts; it threw inconstant sparkles on the clumped holly, struck the light and darkness to and fro like a veil on Alans features, and sent his shadow hovering behind him. All beyond was inscrutable; and Johns dizzy brain rocked with the shadow. Yet even so, it struck him that Alan was pale, and his voice, when he spoke, unnatural.
What brings you here to-night? he began. I dont want, God knows, to seem unfriendly; but I cannot take you in, Nicholson; I cannot do it.
Alan, said John, youve just got to! You dont know the mess Im in; the governors turned me out, and I darent show my face in an inn, because theyre down on me for murder or something!
For what? cried Alan, starting.
Murder, I believe, says John.
Murder! repeated Alan, and passed his hand over his eyes. What was that you were saying? he asked again.
That they were down on me, said John. Im accused of murder, by what I can make out; and Ive really had a dreadful day of it, Alan, and I cant sleep on the roadside on a night like this at least, not with a portmanteau, he pleaded.
Hush! said Alan, with his head on one side; and then, Did you hear nothing? he asked.
No, said John, thrilling, he knew not why, with communicated terror. No, I heard nothing; why? And then, as there was no answer, he reverted to his pleading: But I say, Alan, youve just got to take me in. Ill go right away to bed if you have anything to do. I seem to have been drinking; I was that knocked over. I wouldnt turn you away, Alan, if you were down on your luck.
No? returned Alan. Neither will you, then. Come and lets get your portmanteau.
The cabman was paid, and drove off down the long, lamp-lighted hill, and the two friends stood on the side-walk beside the portmanteau till the last rumble of the wheels had died in silence. It seemed to John as though Alan attached importance to this departure of the cab; and John, who was in no state to criticise, shared profoundly in the feeling.
When the stillness was once more perfect, Alan shouldered the portmanteau, carried it in, and shut and locked the garden door; and then, once more, abstraction seemed to fall upon him, and he stood with his hand on the key, until the cold began to nibble at Johns fingers.
Why are we standing here? asked John.
Eh? said Alan, blankly.
Why, man, you dont seem yourself, said the other.
No, Im not myself, said Alan; and he sat down on the portmanteau and put his face in his hands.
John stood beside him swaying a little, and looking about him at the swaying shadows, the flitting sparkles, and the steady stars overhead, until the windless cold began to touch him through his clothes on the bare skin. Even in his bemused intelligence, wonder began to awake.
I say, lets come on to the house, he said at last.
Yes, lets come on to the house, repeated Alan.
And he rose at once, reshouldered the portmanteau, and taking the candle in his other hand, moved forward to the Lodge. This was a long, low building, smothered in creepers; and now, except for some chinks of light between the dining-room shutters, it was plunged in darkness and silence.
In the hall Alan lighted another candle, gave it to John, and opened the door of a bedroom.
Here, said he; go to bed. Dont mind me, John. Youll be sorry for me when you know.
Wait a bit, returned John; Ive got so cold with all that standing about. Lets go into the dining-room a minute. Just one glass to warm me, Alan.
On the table in the hall stood a glass, and a bottle with a whisky label on a tray. It was plain the bottle had been just opened, for the cork and corkscrew lay beside it.
Take that, said Alan, passing John the whisky, and then with a certain roughness pushed his friend into the bedroom, and closed the door behind him.
John stood amazed; then he shook the bottle, and, to his further wonder, found it partly empty. Three or four glasses were gone. Alan must have uncorked a bottle of whisky and drank three or four glasses one after the other, without sitting down, for there was no chair, and that in his own cold lobby on this freezing night! It fully explained his eccentricities, John reflected sagely, as he mixed himself a grog. Poor Alan! He was drunk; and what a dreadful thing was drink, and what a slave to it poor Alan was, to drink in this unsociable, uncomfortable fashion! The man who would drink alone, except for healths sake as John was now doing was a man utterly lost. He took the grog out, and felt hazier, but warmer. It was hard work opening the portmanteau and finding his night things; and before he was undressed, the cold had struck home to him once more. Well, said he; just a drop more. Theres no sense in getting ill with all this other trouble. And presently dreamless slumber buried him.