CHAPTER V.

IN THE ADVOCATE’S HOUSE

The next day, Sabbath, August 27th, I had the occasion I had long

looked forward to, to hear some of the famous Edinburgh preachers, all

well known to me already by the report of Mr Campbell. Alas! and I

might just as well have been at Essendean, and sitting under Mr.

Campbell’s worthy self! the turmoil of my thoughts, which dwelt

continually on the interview with Prestongrange, inhibiting me from all

attention. I was indeed much less impressed by the reasoning of the

divines than by the spectacle of the thronged congregation in the

churches, like what I imagined of a theatre or (in my then disposition)

of an assize of trial; above all at the West Kirk, with its three tiers

of galleries, where I went in the vain hope that I might see Miss

Drummond.

On the Monday I betook me for the first time to a barber’s, and was

very well pleased with the result. Thence to the Advocate’s, where the

red coats of the soldiers showed again about his door, making a bright

place in the close. I looked about for the young lady and her gillies:

there was never a sign of them. But I was no sooner shown into the

cabinet or antechamber where I had spent so wearyful a time upon the

Saturday, than I was aware of the tall figure of James More in a

corner. He seemed a prey to a painful uneasiness, reaching forth his

feet and hands, and his eyes speeding here and there without rest about

the walls of the small chamber, which recalled to me with a sense of

pity the man’s wretched situation. I suppose it was partly this, and

partly my strong continuing interest in his daughter, that moved me to

accost him.

“Give you a good-morning, sir,” said I.

“And a good-morning to you, sir,” said he.

“You bide tryst with Prestongrange?” I asked.

“I do, sir, and I pray your business with that gentleman be more

agreeable than mine,” was his reply.

“I hope at least that yours will be brief, for I suppose you pass

before me,” said I.

“All pass before me,” he said, with a shrug and a gesture upward of the

open hands. “It was not always so, sir, but times change. It was not so

when the sword was in the scale, young gentleman, and the virtues of

the soldier might sustain themselves.”

There came a kind of Highland snuffle out of the man that raised my

dander strangely.

“Well, Mr. Macgregor,” said I, “I understand the main thing for a

soldier is to be silent, and the first of his virtues never to

complain.”

“You have my name, I perceive”—he bowed to me with his arms

crossed—“though it’s one I must not use myself. Well, there is a

publicity—I have shown my face and told my name too often in the beards

of my enemies. I must not wonder if both should be known to many that I

know not.”

“That you know not in the least, sir,” said I, “nor yet anybody else;

but the name I am called, if you care to hear it, is Balfour.”

“It is a good name,” he replied, civilly; “there are many decent folk

that use it. And now that I call to mind, there was a young gentleman,

your namesake, that marched surgeon in the year ’45 with my battalion.”

“I believe that would be a brother to Balfour of Baith,” said I, for I

was ready for the surgeon now.

“The same, sir,” said James More. “And since I have been fellow-soldier

with your kinsman, you must suffer me to grasp your hand.”

He shook hands with me long and tenderly, beaming on me the while as

though he had found a brother.

“Ah!” says he, “these are changed days since your cousin and I heard

the balls whistle in our lugs.”

“I think he was a very far-away cousin,” said I, drily, “and I ought to

tell you that I never clapped eyes upon the man.”

“Well, well,” said he, “it makes no change. And you—I do not think you

were out yourself, sir—I have no clear mind of your face, which is one

not probable to be forgotten.”

“In the year you refer to, Mr. Macgregor, I was getting skelped in the

parish school,” said I.

“So young!” cries he. “Ah, then, you will never be able to think what

this meeting is to me. In the hour of my adversity, and here in the

house of my enemy, to meet in with the blood of an old

brother-in-arms—it heartens me, Mr. Balfour, like the skirling of the

highland pipes! Sir, this is a sad look back that many of us have to

make: some with falling tears. I have lived in my own country like a

king; my sword, my mountains, and the faith of my friends and kinsmen

sufficed for me. Now I lie in a stinking dungeon; and do you know, Mr.

Balfour,” he went on, taking my arm and beginning to lead me about, “do

you know, sir, that I lack mere ne_cess_aries? The malice of my foes

has quite sequestered my resources. I lie, as you know, sir, on a

trumped-up charge, of which I am as innocent as yourself. They dare not

bring me to my trial, and in the meanwhile I am held naked in my

prison. I could have wished it was your cousin I had met, or his

brother Baith himself. Either would, I know, have been rejoiced to help

me; while a comparative stranger like yourself—”

I would be ashamed to set down all he poured out to me in this beggarly

vein, or the very short and grudging answers that I made to him. There

were times when I was tempted to stop his mouth with some small change;

but whether it was from shame or pride—whether it was for my own sake

or Catriona’s—whether it was because I thought him no fit father for

his daughter, or because I resented that grossness of immediate falsity

that clung about the man himself—the thing was clean beyond me. And I

was still being wheedled and preached to, and still being marched to

and fro, three steps and a turn, in that small chamber, and had

already, by some very short replies, highly incensed, although not

finally discouraged, my beggar, when Prestongrange appeared in the

doorway and bade me eagerly into his big chamber.

“I have a moment’s engagements,” said he; “and that you may not sit

empty-handed I am going to present you to my three braw daughters, of

whom perhaps you may have heard, for I think they are more famous than

papa. This way.”

He led me into another long room above, where a dry old lady sat at a

frame of embroidery, and the three handsomest young women (I suppose)

in Scotland stood together by a window.

“This is my new friend, Mr Balfour,” said he, presenting me by the arm,

“David, here is my sister, Miss Grant, who is so good as keep my house

for me, and will be very pleased if she can help you. And here,” says

he, turning to the three younger ladies, “here are my _three braw

dauchters_. A fair question to ye, Mr. Davie: which of the three is the

best favoured? And I wager he will never have the impudence to propound

honest Alan Ramsay’s answer!”

Hereupon all three, and the old Miss Grant as well, cried out against

this sally, which (as I was acquainted with the verses he referred to)

brought shame into my own check. It seemed to me a citation

unpardonable in a father, and I was amazed that these ladies could

laugh even while they reproved, or made believe to.

Under cover of this mirth, Prestongrange got forth of the chamber, and

I was left, like a fish upon dry land, in that very unsuitable society.

I could never deny, in looking back upon what followed, that I was

eminently stockish; and I must say the ladies were well drilled to have

so long a patience with me. The aunt indeed sat close at her

embroidery, only looking now and again and smiling; but the misses, and

especially the eldest, who was besides the most handsome, paid me a

score of attentions which I was very ill able to repay. It was all in

vain to tell myself I was a young follow of some worth as well as a

good estate, and had no call to feel abashed before these lasses, the

eldest not so much older than myself, and no one of them by any

probability half as learned. Reasoning would not change the fact; and

there were times when the colour came into my face to think I was

shaved that day for the first time.

The talk going, with all their endeavours, very heavily, the eldest

took pity on my awkwardness, sat down to her instrument, of which she

was a passed mistress, and entertained me for a while with playing and

singing, both in the Scots and in the Italian manners; this put me more

at my ease, and being reminded of Alan’s air that he had taught me in

the hole near Carriden, I made so bold as to whistle a bar or two, and

ask if she knew that.

She shook her head. “I never heard a note of it,” said she. “Whistle it

all through. And now once again,” she added, after I had done so.

Then she picked it out upon the keyboard, and (to my surprise)

instantly enriched the same with well-sounding chords, and sang, as she

played, with a very droll expression and broad accent—

“Haenae I got just the lilt of it?

Isnae this the tune that ye whustled?”

“You see,” she says, “I can do the poetry too, only it won’t rhyme. And

then again:

“I am Miss Grant, sib to the Advocate:

You, I believe, are Dauvit Balfour.”

I told her how much astonished I was by her genius.

“And what do you call the name of it?” she asked.

“I do not know the real name,” said I. “I just call it _Alan’s air_.”

She looked at me directly in the face. “I shall call it _David’s air_,”

said she; “though if it’s the least like what your namesake of Israel

played to Saul I would never wonder that the king got little good by

it, for it’s but melancholy music. Your other name I do not like; so if

you was ever wishing to hear your tune again you are to ask for it by

mine.”

This was said with a significance that gave my heart a jog. “Why that,

Miss Grant?” I asked.

“Why,” says she, “if ever you should come to get hanged, I will set

your last dying speech and confession to that tune and sing it.”

This put it beyond a doubt that she was partly informed of my story and

peril. How, or just how much, it was more difficult to guess. It was

plain she knew there was something of danger in the name of Alan, and

thus warned me to leave it out of reference; and plain she knew that I

stood under some criminal suspicion. I judged besides that the

harshness of her last speech (which besides she had followed up

immediately with a very noisy piece of music) was to put an end to the

present conversation. I stood beside her, affecting to listen and

admire, but truly whirled away by my own thoughts. I have always found

this young lady to be a lover of the mysterious; and certainly this

first interview made a mystery that was beyond my plummet. One thing I

learned long after, the hours of the Sunday had been well employed, the

bank porter had been found and examined, my visit to Charles Stewart

was discovered, and the deduction made that I was pretty deep with

James and Alan, and most likely in a continued correspondence with the

last. Hence this broad hint that was given me across the harpsichord.

In the midst of the piece of music, one of the younger misses, who was

at a window over the close, cried on her sisters to come quick, for

there was “_Grey eyes_ again.” The whole family trooped there at once,

and crowded one another for a look. The window whither they ran was in

an odd corner of that room, gave above the entrance door, and flanked

up the close.

“Come, Mr. Balfour,” they cried, “come and see. She is the most

beautiful creature! She hangs round the close-head these last days,

always with some wretched-like gillies, and yet seems quite a lady.”

I had no need to look; neither did I look twice, or long. I was afraid

she might have seen me there, looking down upon her from that chamber

of music, and she without, and her father in the same house, perhaps

begging for his life with tears, and myself come but newly from

rejecting his petitions. But even that glance set me in a better

conceit of myself and much less awe of the young ladies. They were

beautiful, that was beyond question, but Catriona was beautiful too,

and had a kind of brightness in her like a coal of fire. As much as the

others cast me down, she lifted me up. I remembered I had talked easily

with her. If I could make no hand of it with these fine maids, it was

perhaps something their own fault. My embarrassment began to be a

little mingled and lightened with a sense of fun; and when the aunt

smiled at me from her embroidery, and the three daughters unbent to me

like a baby, all with “papa’s orders” written on their faces, there

were times when I could have found it in my heart to smile myself.

Presently papa returned, the same kind, happy-like, pleasant-spoken

man.

“Now, girls,” said he, “I must take Mr. Balfour away again; but I hope

you have been able to persuade him to return where I shall be always

gratified to find him.”

So they each made me a little farthing compliment, and I was led away.

If this visit to the family had been meant to soften my resistance, it

was the worst of failures. I was no such ass but what I understood how

poor a figure I had made, and that the girls would be yawning their

jaws off as soon as my stiff back was turned. I felt I had shown how

little I had in me of what was soft and graceful; and I longed for a

chance to prove that I had something of the other stuff, the stern and

dangerous.

Well, I was to be served to my desire, for the scene to which he was

conducting me was of a different character.