The Rhymer

THE RHYMER

By Allan McAulay

CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK :: :: :: :: :: 1900

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK

TO
MARY AND JEANIE

THE RHYMER

CHAPTER I.

In the year of grace 1787, Mr. Graham of The Mains, a worthy gentleman and laird of the county of Perth, had a family of seven daughters. This, though hardly at that date amounting to a social crime, was an indiscretion in a man of few acres and modest income. Moreover, his partner in life was even now a blooming and a buxom dame, capable of adding further olive branches to the already over-umbrageous family tree. She had, indeed, but lately performed the somewhat procrastinated duty of adding an heir to the tale of the seven lasses of The Mains. This was as it should be—but it was quite enough.

It was market day in the autumn of the year, and Mr. Graham, who farmed his own land, had attended the weekly market at the country town of C——. He was about to jog home in the dusk, when he was accosted by a neighbour and fellow-laird.

'Hey—Mains!' called out this personage. 'Bide a bit, man! It is in my mind to do you and the mistress at The Mains a good turn.' Mr. Graham drew rein.

'It is not I that will miss a chance of that,' he observed, in good humour.

'Well, to be straight to the point,' said his friend, 'I have a friend biding with me at this time, one Jimmy Cheape—you may have heard me speak of him, for he was a crony of our college days. He is a man of substance in the county of Fife—and he has a mind to be made acquainted with you and your lady.'

'Ay, ay!' ejaculated Mr. Graham. 'A most laudable and polite wish, truly, and not to be gainsaid!'

'He is in search of a wife,' said the friend, slily, with a dig in the ribs of the laird with the butt-end of his whip, 'and I bethought me that a presentation to a man with seven daughters was the very thing to be useful. So I promised it, and he jumped for it—as keen as a cock at a groset.'

Mr. Graham pricked up his ears.

'That's the wife's business rather than mine,' he observed, cautiously.

'Well! let the wife see him, but see him yourself first. Yonder he is.' The speaker pointed to a burly form, standing with its back to the friends. 'I will bring him forward;' and he proceeded to be as good as his word.

When Mr. Cheape, of the county of Fife, presented his countenance to his possible father-in-law of the future, he was found to be a gentleman of decidedly mature age, already grey, deeply pitted with the smallpox, and of no very alluring address. His salutation was gruff, and his eye shifty.

'To-morrow,' he remarked, with rather alarming abruptness, immediately after the form of introduction had been gone through, 'I will wait upon Mrs. Graham at The Mains, at about eleven of the clock in the morning.' With that he stumped off, for he added to his other peculiarities that of being rather lame of one leg.

'Ah! he means business, you see!' said the intermediary, admiringly. The corners of Mr. Graham's mouth, which had taken an upward inclination at the first salutation of his friend, now drooped considerably, as he gazed after his new acquaintance.

'He is somewhat well on in years,' he remarked, dubiously, 'and there is not that about him that will take a lass's fancy.'

'Tut!' said his friend, 'there is well-nigh one thousand a year about him and his bonny bit place of Kincarley in the county of Fife; and he has fine store of plate and plenishing of linen—so he tells me—as well as the siller. And that takes a lass's fancy fast enough, let me tell you.'

'Well, maybe,' said the laird, and he gave the reins a jog. 'Good-night to you, and you shall hear what betides.'

Mr. Graham jogged home along the muddy roads towards The Mains in a meditative mood. The thought of his seven daughters often sat heavy on his mind. He could not portion them, and, with or without portions, it was difficult to imagine how they could marry or settle in a part of the country so remote, that society could hardly be said to exist—daughters, as they were, of a man who could not possibly afford to send them to share the gaieties of the capital, or even of the distant county town. Yet their marriage was a fixed idea with his wife, as he well knew—the only idea, indeed, for their future which it was natural and proper, at that day, for her to entertain. Alison, their eldest girl, was almost twenty, and at that age her mother had been already three years married and had a thriving nursery; two others, well arrived at woman's estate, trod closely on her heels. Very well indeed could the laird imagine with what enthusiasm his partner would welcome the advent of a suitor, and a wealthy suitor, too. Yet he had vague doubts as to whether he should have placed this temptation within reach of the eager mother of seven daughters. Perhaps it would have been better to have declined the visit from Mr. Cheape once for all. For although this obscure country laird of old-time Scotland had a rough exterior, not differing greatly from that of a farmer or yeoman of the better class, and though he rode a horse that sometimes drew the plough, a clumsy figure in his brass-buttoned blue coat and miry buckskins, yet he was a gentleman at heart, and an honest man to boot. He had been far from admiring the exterior and address of Mr. Cheape of Kincarley, and compunction assailed him when he thought of his Alison, or Kate, or Maggie, subjected to the wooing of such a bear. However, it was their mother's affair, he thought, with that comfortable shifting of responsibility on to feminine shoulders which man has so gracefully inherited from Adam. Besides, he looked forward to telling the news, being a bit of a humorist in his own way. So he whipped up the old horse into a heavy trot.

The Mains lay low and sheltered in the heart of an uninteresting agricultural corner of the Perthshire lowlands. It was a low, rambling, old house, of no pretensions—little better, indeed, than a farm—with small windows in thick walls, and little low-ceilinged, ill-lighted rooms. There were some fine sycamores about it, the abode of an ancient rookery, and a grand lime tree grew in the field in front of the house—so very old that no one knew or could guess its age. To the east of The Mains lay its farm buildings, and beyond them again the old-fashioned tangled garden. Further, and around on all sides, were thick spruce woods, where the wild pigeons crooned in the summer, and there were always cones for the gathering. Through gaps in the woods, and from certain points of vantage on The Mains's land, you could see the Highland hills. But to Alison and her little sisters these always seemed far, far away—as though in another country altogether.

Lights in the deep-set windows welcomed the laird, and they were cheery in the damp murk of the autumn evening. When he was divested of his mud-stiffened riding gear, he stretched himself at ease before the crackling fire in his own sanctum, and his lady joined him. It was a long, low, dark room, lined with fusty books, which no one ever took from the shelves. The mantelpiece was of solid stone, washed a pale green, and—chiseled roughly—just below the shelf was a motto, rudely finished off with a clam-shell, the crest of the Grahams:—

'In human life there's nothing steadfast stands,

Youth, Glorie, Riches fade. Death's sure at hand.'

So it said. But neither the laird nor the lady of The Mains had any air of paying attention to this warning of a somewhat despondent progenitor.

The mistress of the house was a handsome woman still, in spite of household and maternal cares. Above the middle height, and of comely figure, she had hair still raven black, a glowing colour in her soft unwithered cheek, and the light of a strong and unimpaired vitality in her fine, though rather hard, black eye. She had the complete empire over her husband, which such a woman will ever have over men—a woman, healthy, fresh, strong-willed, though not moulded, perhaps, in the most refined of nature's moulds. He had married her in his youth—the daughter of a small Glasgow lawyer, hardly, perhaps, his equal from a social point of view. But this was a failing soon overlooked in the blooming, hearty, managing bride, who brought fresh blood to mingle with the rather attenuated strain of a genteel Scottish family, which boasted more lineage than looks.

The laird stretched himself to the genial warmth, and prepared to enjoy the communication of his bit of news.

'A gentleman is to visit us here at The Mains to-morrow in the morning, wife,' he began, casually.

'Oh, ay,' said Mrs. Graham, in the tone of one who expects no pleasant surprises. 'It'll be Cultobanocher or Drumore, likely, to speir about the grey mare and her foal.'

'Not at all,' said the laird, 'but a stranger this time—one Cheape of Kincarley, in the county of Fife, at this time abiding with Drumore.'

'And what will he be wanting with us?' inquired the mistress of The Mains.

'A wife, it would seem,' said the laird, in a carefully-suppressed tone of voice, but a twinkle in his eye.

'Tut, laird!' said the lady, crossly, 'you're joking, but none of your jokes for me!' She indeed believed the news too good to be true, and was wroth with the laird for tantalising her on so tender a subject.

'I am not joking—not I,' protested the husband and father. ''Tis the living truth, as I sit here. This fellow will be over here to-morrow at noon to see if he cannot choose a wife among our seven lasses.'

Then followed, in answer to a rain of questions from the excited lady, a full and particular account of Mr. Cheape, his means and estate—all, indeed, that the laird could tell. Mrs. Graham's face was flushed, her eyes sparkling; the corners of her full, firm mouth twitched with eagerness. Before the conversation was half over, she had the wedding settled in her mind, with already a side-thought for the bride's dress, and such scanty plenishing as could be spared from The Mains.

'And to think that I was putting poor Ally down for an old maid!' she exclaimed, rapturously. 'The girl with never a man after her yet, and then to have this rich husband flung at her head! She was born with a silver spoon in her mouth, after all—poor Ally!'

'Bide a wee!' said the laird, cautiously. 'Wait till you see the man, my woman! A grey beard, even like myself, and speckled like a puddock wi' the cow-pox. I doubt the girl will get a scunner when she sees him.'

But his partner pounced upon his doubts with righteous anger.

'Laird,' she said, 'if I see you putting the like o' that into Ally's head, I'll be at the end of my patience. Setting the lass against her meat that gait—such foolery!'

'Lasses think of love—' began the laird.

'Love, indeed!' almost screamed the lady; 'and what right has she to think of love, and her almost twenty, and never a jo to her name yet, or a man's kiss but her father's on the cheek o' her? When I was her age, well knew I what love was; but she—let her thank her stars she's got this chance, and needna pine a spinster all her days!'

'Well, well,' said the laird, uncomfortably, 'manage it your own way. I'll keep my fingers out of the pie. And sort you Mr. Cheape of Kincarley when he comes to-morrow, for I'll ha' none of him!'

His lady, finding he would respond on the subject no longer, bustled off to her daughter.

CHAPTER II.

'Ally, Ally!' she called in her clear, strong voice all over the house, 'where are you, Ally?' and through the darkening passages she went in eager search of her eldest daughter. The seven lasses of The Mains were variously disposed of in the old warren of a house—in the lesser rooms, in the attics under the roof, reached by a spiral wooden stair, on which their young feet clattered up and down from early morn till early bed-time.

At this moment Alison was putting to bed her two-year-old brother, the 'young laird,' and apple of all eyes at The Mains. She sat with him in her arms at the tiny window of the nursery and crooned him to sleep, and as she sang she looked out at the murky red sky behind the plane trees, at the rooks circling and cawing on their way to bed, at the old lime, a towering mass of black shadow in the gloaming. This was the scene that Alison looked upon continually every evening of her life—this young woman without lovers and innocent of kisses.

Mrs. Graham was breathing rather quickly by the time she stood at the nursery door, and her first elated sentences were somewhat breathless.

'Braw news your father has brought home for you to-night, Ally!' she began.

'Wheesht, mother!' said Alison, 'you will waken Jacky.'

'Ah!' said Mrs. Graham, knowingly, 'you'll soon have done with Jacky now!'

'Sure,' said Alison, lifting round grey eyes to her mother's face, and pressing Jacky's head close to her shoulder, 'I've no wish to be done with Jacky;' and she put a kiss on the boy's curls.

'Tut!' said Mrs. Graham, impatiently, 'you might have little Jackys of your own. Think you never of that, Ally?' Alison blushed in the dark: it was not a fair question. Jacky was so sound asleep by this time that the voices did not wake him, and she rose, laid him on the wooden cot beside her own bed, and happed the clothes about him with deft movements full of a natural motherliness.

'Come down now, Ally,' said her mother, 'I want you.'

Alison obeyed her mother, as hitherto she had always done, in the simple management of her life.

'You are to get a man, Ally, after all,' said the lady, impressively. 'A husband, and a good one. Isn't that the brawest news ever you've heard yet?'

Alison was not quite certain, but there is no doubt, simple soul that she was, that she was impressed and awed, and that a flutter disturbed her quiet heart. Alison had never read even the few romances of her day, and knew nothing about love; and although she sang, in her sweet, untrained voice, as she went about the house, the love-songs of her country, often piercing in their pathos and passion—their language was a sealed book to her. True, Kirsty the dairy-maid had a lover who put an arm round her willing waist, and Alison had seen the pair walking so, in many a gloaming, by the gate of the cow-park. Would she have a lover now, and an arm round her waist? Mrs. Graham did not dwell on such things in the present interview with her daughter; but she spoke of Mr. Cheape of Kincarley with solemn impressiveness; of his house and his lands, and his plate and his linen, and Alison was no unwilling listener. It was a calm-blooded, unawakened nature, this of Alison's yet, moulded in the dim monotony of obscure country life, in daily performance of humble duties; a heart stirred yet by no passion more mastering than a sister's matter-of-course love for other sisters, and the little brother, born so late. She was a sensible, steady girl, yet only a girl, after all; and I do not say, that night, as she lay down in her narrow, hard bed beside the softly-breathing baby-brother, that she did not dream of a bridegroom and a wedding-dress.

Next morning, at the usual hour, Alison attended to one of her accustomed duties, the care of a flock of young turkeys, in a meadow by the farm. They were a late brood, and the object of Alison's most anxious solicitude. This morning her mother had commanded her to put on a better gown than usual, and to place upon her curls a fine mob-cap of lace and cambric, whose flapping frills annoyed her. It was an antique piece of finery, belonging to her mother's girlhood rather than to hers; but fashions at The Mains were not advanced. Alison's looks were not thought greatly of by her parents. She lacked her mother's brilliant colouring and bold, black-eyed beauty. She was rather pale, indeed, though with a healthy, even pallor that a touch of cold wind or a little exertion easily brightened into a pleasing softness of pink. Her hair, which would never grow beyond her shoulders for length, curled all about her ears and neck—tendrils borrowed from the stubborn, reddish locks of her father, only they were not red, but of a light, sunny brown. Her face had the calmness and strength of clear-cut features, and she was tall beyond the common, well and strongly made. Not an unpleasing figure at all was she, as she stood calling to her turkeys, the autumn sun catching at her hair, and shining in her grey eyes. Yet the hearts of her parents misgave them, as they saw her, lest she should fail to find favour in the eyes of Mr. Cheape of Kincarley.

For Mr. Cheape had arrived, and, with laudable punctuality, had stumped into the library, where the laird, who had been talked round the night before into a temporary acquiescence in his suit, waited to receive him. To the pair, presently entered the lady of the house in her Sunday silk, and genteelest manners. A gruff nod to the laird, and a stiff inclination to his dame, was all the salutation vouchsafed by Mr. Cheape, who then stood hitting at his boots with the whip in his hand, and grunting at intervals.

''Tis a fine morning for the time of the year, and grand for lifting the neeps,' began the laird, with a cough.

Mr. Cheape snorted. 'I'm not here,' he remarked, with plainness, 'to discuss the weather and turnips. I'm come, ma'am, to be presented to your daughters;' and he ignored the laird, and addressed himself to the lady.

'To my Daughter Alison, doubtless?' said Mrs. Graham, with polite firmness.

'Hum,' said Mr. Cheape, 'I understood there were seven of them.'

'We are blessed with seven girls, indeed,' said Mrs. Graham, majestically. 'But our daughter Alison is the only one from whom we could think of parting ourselves at this time. The rest'—coolly—'are bairns.'

'I should like to see them all,' objected the suitor, who felt himself being 'done.'

'You will see Alison,' said Mrs. Graham, composedly. 'You must e'en take them as the Lord gave them—or want!' she added, with spirit. ('To think,' as she said to her husband afterwards, 'if I hadna been canny—he might ha' taken Susie or Maggie, as likely as not—and left Ally on our hands!')

'Mr. Cheape is pleased to be plain and to the point,' here interrupted the laird, not without sarcasm in his tone, which, however, was quite lost upon his visitor. 'We have, indeed, seven lasses, and little to give them, sir, and cannot therefore be over nice in the matter of their wooing. Alison is at her turkeys in the east meadow, wife. Supposing we conduct this gentleman to the spot, and see if he is inclined to make a bargain of it?'

So Alison's fate approached her in this quaint fashion, Mr. Cheape stumping at her mother's side, and the laird bringing up the rear, with a comical eye on the suitor's burly back. They paused at a gate where Alison could not see them, but they could see her in a patch of sun, with the turkeys picking and cheeping at her feet. 'Is that the one?' said Mr. Cheape, pointing at the object of his wooing with his whip.

'Our daughter Alison,' said Mrs. Graham, complacently, with an introductory wave of the hand. 'But twenty, come the New Year time,' for she much feared that Alison looked older.

Mr. Cheape seemed lost in thought and calculation. 'A knowledge of fowls,' he said at last, heavily, 'is useful in a female.'

''Tis indispensable in the lady of a country mansion,' said Mrs. Graham, cheerfully. 'And none beats Alison at that, let me tell you!'

'Alison, come here!' called her father. Alison turned round and obeyed. When she approached the group which held her suitor, she curtseyed, but the behaviour of Mr. Cheape at this juncture was so singular and so disconcerting, that there was no time for a formal introduction between the two. Whether it was the wide, all-too-frankly astonished gaze of Alison's grey eyes, or the young lady's imposing height, or simply a fit of bashfulness that overpowered him, cannot be said. But merely the fact can be given, that at this delicate juncture the gallant wooer, with a fiercer grunt than usual, and some muttered exclamation which no one caught, incontinently turned tail and fled towards the house, the distracted matron almost running in his wake. Alison and her father were left together.

'Is that Mr. Cheape, sir?' enquired the daughter, gravely.

'Ay, lass,' said the laird. ''Tis even the great Mr. Cheape of Kincarley, in the county of Fife!'

Alison said nothing, but with her chin in the air, and lilting the flounces of her good dress above the wet grass she went back to her turkeys. Her father laughed his jolly laugh. 'He will have none of you, Ally, that's plain!' he called after her. 'So don't you be losing your heart to his bonny face, I warn you!'

CHAPTER III.

But so very far was the laird of The Mains from being accurate in his assertion of Mr. Cheape's indifference to his daughter's charms, that when he re-entered the library, which he presently did, he found that gentleman and his wife in the closest confabulation, the subject of their discourse being no other than that of a contract of marriage between Miss Graham of The Mains, and Mr. Cheape of Kincarley. The latter gentleman appeared now to be much easier of demeanour.

'These matters,' he observed, almost jocularly, 'are better settled without the presence of the lady!'

'But, God bless my soul!' cried the laird, 'you hardly saw the girl, or she you—'

'Oh, she'll do, she'll do,' said Mr. Cheape, with an agreeable grunt, but an air of hurry. 'An' now I must away: good-day, good-day!' He stuck out a snuffy hand, which Mrs. Graham clutched with warmth. 'Sir,' he continued, addressing the laird, 'if you will be pleased to honour me with your company at dinner to-morrow night at four, at the King's Arms in C——, we can discuss this matter at our ease. I am in a position to act handsomely on my part, as I have informed your lady. But 'tis better to discuss such matters between gentlemen. Good-day t'you.' He had hurried off, and had scrambled upon his horse at the door, with some assistance from that animal's abundant mane, and was jogging down the approach, before the open-mouthed laird had found time or presence of mind to accept or reject the invitation to dinner.

'Saw ever man the like of that!' ejaculated the master of the house, gazing after man and horse.

'Saw ever woman the like o' you!' retorted his spouse, furiously, 'staring like a stuck pig after an honest gentleman that's done you the honour to speir your penniless daughter, instead of shaking him warmly by the hand!'

'I'd as lief shake the tatty-bogle by the hand,' said the laird, provokingly. 'Wife, you're clever, but you'll never get Ally to stomach yon,' and he indicated the disappearing Mr. Cheape with a derisive finger.

'Will I not?' retorted the lady, with a defiant eye, 'ye sumph, John, to take the bread out of a lassie's mouth like that, afore she's bitten on it. Ye are even a bigger fool than I thocht ye!'

With such plainness was the much-tried mother of many daughters driven to address their exasperating father. The laird laughed: but then and there a serious marital tussle began, the kind in which the laird was never victorious. Mr. Graham announced that he would not dine with Mr. Cheape to-morrow night, or any other: that it was useless, that there was no object in his putting himself about to do so, in as much as that Mr. Cheape's proposals were preposterous, and not for a moment to be seriously entertained. Mrs. Graham, on the other hand, asserted that, dine with Mr. Cheape of Kincarley, at four of the clock to-morrow evening at the King's Arms in C——, he, Mr. Graham of The Mains, in his best blue coat and ruffled shirt, with powder in his hair—most unquestionably would, and should. Gradually, the laughing mood went out of the laird. For his lady intrenched upon money matters, and got him on the raw there, as only a wife or a creditor can. The laird at this time was an embarrassed man, and very eager to be quit of his embarrassments. Previous to the birth of his son, and when it was thought he would not have an heir, but that the entail, at his death, would send The Mains to a distant cousin, he had been careless of money, and had considerably burdened the estate. Now it was the wish of his heart to lift these burdens, and leave an unencumbered inheritance to the young laird; and if it was his wish, it was his wife's passion.

'What is to become of these lasses? Are they all to hang upon their brother?' was the eternal burden of her cry. Twenty-four hours of unremitted harping upon this subject, under all its aspects, reduced the laird to a frame of mind in which he would have dined with Beelzebub, had the dinner promised him a solution of his difficulties, and peace with his wife. Needless to say, therefore, he dined with Mr. Cheape, of Kincarley, on the appointed day and hour; and, moreover, did not come home until past two o'clock on the following morning.

For, let it be remembered, these were the jolly days of the bottle, when a man was no man who could not carry his port, and carry it home, too. The laird of The Mains was no drunkard, but he had a head of iron and a stomach of leather in the good old style of our ancestors. He was a four-bottle-man with the best of them, and he chanced to find in Mr. Cheape of Kincarley just such another hardened elderly cask as himself. The two sat hour after hour, swallowing glass after glass, at first in gloomy silence; but presently each began to mellow in his own way. The laird's tongue was loosened, and he began to talk about his daughters and his difficulties. Mr. Cheape lost his shyness, became genial and generous; at any time, to do him justice, he was a man not niggardly in money-matters. The settlements he proposed to make upon his bride were more than handsome: to the impoverished laird they sounded princely. And it is a fact—such are the wonder-working powers of the rosy god of wine—that before the night was out, not only were the preliminaries of a marriage contract agreed upon, but the laird had become a borrower on his own account, and Mr. Cheape a lender, of certain sums that the laird had been at his wits' end, for many a day, to lay his hands on. When he got home, which he managed to do upon his horse with the utmost propriety, he was not precisely in a condition to explain complicated money transactions with absolute perspicacity. But the morning brought explanations which were eminently satisfactory to the wife of his bosom. Certain twinges of conscience indeed assailed the laird, and during the morning's narration, he was not quite so comfortable in his mind as he had been over-night. What about Alison's part of the bargain? But he reflected that he was the father of seven penniless girls, and must harden his heart.

Alison, meanwhile, made fun of Mr. Cheape in the attics, among her sisters. True, there was a prick of disappointment at her heart, for her mother had dangled a wedding before her eyes, and a wedding meant a lover, of course. But the happy heart of twenty is sound and light, and by next morning Alison had forgotten her disappointment, and Mr. Cheape along with it. Her mother's early summons gave her no misgiving.

'Come with me to the big press in the east passage, Alison,' said the dame, jingling a bunch of keys, and with the light of battle in her eye. ''Tis time we looked at something there, and I have a mind to have a talk with you, besides.' And at this Alison's heart did certainly jump—not pleasantly.

The big press in the east passage smelt agreeably of dried lavender and rose leaves. Here was store of fine linen, and a few of the more valued articles of personal apparel.

'Get out my wedding-silk, Ally,' commanded Mrs. Graham. Alison reached up long arms, and got down the silk, which was laid by, with layers of fine muslin between its folds. It was a superb brocade of sweet floral bunches on a ground of greenish-grey; the flounces of Mechlin on it were fragile as a fairy's web, and ivory-tinted with age. Mrs. Graham fingered and examined the fabric; then she said, significantly:

'So, 'tis you that's going to rob me of my fine silk, after all, Ally? 'Tis just as it should be—my eldest girl!' Alison shook in her shoes, for she knew well that determined inflection of the maternal voice.

'I don't understand, mother,' she managed to stammer.

'Tuts, nonsense!' said Mrs. Graham, sharply, 'you're no fool, Ally: you understand fine. That honest gentleman you saw yesterday is to marry you, and lucky you are to get him!'

'Sure, not that man, mother!' cried poor Alison.

'And why not that man, miss?' retorted the matron with a rising colour and an angry eye.

'He's as old as my father,' blurted out the reluctant bride, 'and has no liking for me, for-bye!'

'And why should he ask you when he's seen you, if he has no liking for you?' demanded the matron.

'Because no one else will have him, likely,' said Alison, in desperation. She had never spoken in rebellion to her mother before, and the effort it cost her was truly desperate. 'If I have to take that man,' she plunged on recklessly, 'I'll be the laughing-stock of the countryside and of my very sisters!'

'Alison,' said Mrs. Graham, in a more reasoning tone, for she felt her own strength, 'you are a silly lassie, and just don't know the grand chance you're wanting to throw away. Think what it will be to be a married woman, wi' a house and man of your own—a man of substance, too—and lord it over a whole countryside! Why, here, Ally, you're little better than a nurse-girl and a hen-wife!'

'And I'd rather be a nurse-girl and a hen-wife all my days, than married to that old man,' cried Alison, with a rising sob. 'He'll neither love me, nor I him!'

'Love!' cried Mrs. Graham, with a blaze of fury, 'and who taught you to speak of love, and you twenty, and never a lover near you! Set you up to be saucy, indeed! I had had my choice long afore I was your age, and might ha' turned up a neb at a decent man, maybe. But for the likes of you, it's very different, let me tell you!'

'You lived in a town,' said poor Alison, in weak defence, 'and saw the men.'

'Town or no town makes no difference,' said Mrs. Graham with lofty superiority. 'The men come down the lum to likely lasses, and them that's not likely may be thankful to get a chance at all. What's to become of you all,' she continued, her tone of reasoning degenerating into the high voice of the scold, 'you seven muckle, useless lasses? Are you all to sorn on Jacky, poor wee man, for all his days, and take the very bread out of his mouth?'

'I would not sorn on Jacky,' said Alison, with a quivering lip.

'Then get you a husband, and no nonsense!' said Mrs. Graham. ''Tis, indeed, a settled business,' she went on, coolly, 'settled by your father.'

'Oh, I'll not believe it!' cried Alison, fairly in tears. 'Let me see my father first.'

'That you shall not,' said Mrs. Graham with force. Well she knew the inevitable effects of a daughter's tears on that weak man. It became an indispensable thing, in fact, that Alison should not see her father, and to that end firm measures must at once be taken.

'Up you get to your room, and stay there, miss, till you are of a better mind,' said the stern mother of seven, who did not stick at trifles. She chased Alison up the garret stair, shut the door on her, and turned the key.

'A few days o' that,' she said to herself triumphantly, 'and she'll be ready to jump at Mr. Cheape—honest man.'

CHAPTER IV.

I no not wish, in the very opening of her story, to give the idea that Alison Graham was a girl of poor spirit. Perhaps she should have turned upon her mother on the stair, or, at any rate, stood up for her freedom with a bolder front. But the habit of Alison's life, up to this point, had been obedience, and, in the days of which I write, parental authority was no matter to be trifled with. It wanted a hundred years yet to the birth of the Revolted Daughter, and to Alison, even the tacit form of resistance which she was about to offer to her parents' wishes, seemed a very terrible and almost wicked line of conduct. She sat down on the creepie-stool by the little window, where she was wont to sing Jacky to sleep every night, and was too much puzzled and too heavy at the heart to cry. Presently her sisters came and tirled at the door, wanting to know what was the matter; but the key was safely in the maternal pocket, and Alison shut off from comfort and communion of these friendly spirits. Then her tears began to flow, in very pity for herself; but she was quite determined that she would have none of Mr. Cheape.

'The lass will never be got to thole him, I doubt,' said the laird, with a sigh. Now that there was a matter of money between him and Mr. Cheape, his position was complicated, and he could no longer openly side with his daughter.

'Leave that to me,' said Mrs. Graham, grimly. To her mind it was like the breaking in of a colt or filly—a fling up, a few kicks over the traces, and a little restiveness at first, to be treated with a firm hand, judiciously low diet, and a new bit.

'She's saucy,' said the mother of seven. 'She'll be cured of that in a day or two!'

'Do not be hard on poor Ally,' said the laird, sorely pricked with compunction.

''Tis for her own good,' the lady replied, with no doubt upon that point whatsoever.

In this awkward predicament it was lucky that the gallant wooer of Miss Graham of The Mains gave no trouble. Mr. Cheape of Kincarley having, in his opinion, safely secured a bride, was, in the meantime, returned to the county of Fife, doubtless to make preparation for the impending change in his condition. He required no silly assurances or fruitless antenuptial interviews with the lady herself.

Thus Alison remained a prisoner in her little room, deprived of all her daily tasks and little pleasures, and of all good cheer of warmth and light and company. The actual prisoner's fare of bread and water was indeed not hers, but clots of half-cold porridge and a sup of skim-milk twice a day are not enticing provender, nor greatly calculated to keep up a flagging spirit. Her mother was her only jailer, and with her own hands dunted down this unsavoury dog's mess before her, with the unceasing jibe upon her tongue—angry, persuasive, mocking, cruel, all in turn. The weather, meanwhile, without doors, had broken for the season, and the days were short and dark and dreary. The rain lashed the little deep-set window, and Alison sat shivering beside it, and listening to the howling wind, which whirled the dead leaves off the trees and drove the protesting rooks from shelter to shelter. She was a girl of great good sense and a clear head. She could see her mother's point of view well enough. There were seven of them—she and her sisters—and what was to become of them if they did not marry? She had had no lovers, therefore it was quite true she had no right to be saucy. But to marry Mr. Cheape! Her gorge rose at the thought of him, of the ugly, pitted face, the grizzled, scrubby beard, the uncouth form and fashion of the man. Surely that was not to be expected of her? No! So Alison held out, and the dreary days dragged on, till all but a week had passed.

Then, at dusk one night, when her heart was faint within her, and her body faint too, for lack of fresh air and wonted food, her father, having purloined the key, came creeping up to her attic—very quietly, good man (indeed, upon his stocking soles)—so that the mistress, engaged in hustling the maids in a distant laundry, should have no chance of hearing.

''Tis a pity, all this, Ally,' he said, in the dark.

Alison did not trust her voice to answer.

'Were your mother not so doom-set on it,' went on the laird—'and sure she ought to know what is best for lasses—I would say never mind, and let Mr. Cheape go hang. But she's set on it, sure and fast, Ally; and maybe it's not just such a bad thing as it looks.' He stopped and coughed; nothing but his daughter's quick breathing answered him. 'He's not a bonny man, I will say,' he continued; 'but 'tisn't always the handsome faces and the fine manners that pay best in the end, Ally. Mr. Cheape is most handsome in his dealings if he's not so in his looks; and, on my soul, I think he would do well by a wife.' No answer yet. 'You would not help to ruin Jacky, would you, Ally?' urged the laird, pathetically.

'Indeed, no,' said Alison at last, in a low voice.

'But ruin him you will in the future, if you let this chance go by,' said the laird more firmly, for he was conscious of his advantage. 'Mr. Cheape is a monied man, and generous with his money, and we have profited by that already. I have taken a loan from him, at a nominal interest, which has greatly eased my circumstances; but I cannot hold to that if you give Mr. Cheape the go-by, Ally.'

'I didn't know of that, sir,' said Alison.

''Tis true,' said the laird, 'and not over much to my credit, for it seems like the selling of you, lass. But 'tis for your own good in the end, too, I swear, or I would hold back yet. What's your future, Ally, but to feed the hens? And when we're gone—your mother and I—to feed them to Jacky's wife, and she perhaps not so willing to let you. There's not much lies before you here, my lassie.' It seemed not, indeed.

'Then there's all your sisters—poor, silly bodies,' pursued the laird, who knew his ground, in Alison's nature, better than did his wife, because it was akin to his own weaker flesh. 'What a chance for them in this braw marriage of yours! You can give them a lift, poor lasses, such as we never can.... 'Tis not to ourselves alone we live in this world, Ally!'

'No, sir,' said Alison, quietly. Then, all of a sudden, she reached for the tinder-box, and, rising, lit the little cruisey lamp upon the wall. By its weak flame, her father could see her standing before him, very tall and straight, her face very white, the cheeks a little hollow with a week of fasting, and the tumbled curls about her broad, soft brows.

'I will have to take Mr. Cheape, sir, I see,' she said, a little doggedly, 'since it is best for everybody, and I will—if I can.'

'Now that's a sensible lassie!' cried the laird, 'and how pleased your mother will be!' And, indeed, his own life, from that lady's displeasure, had been little, if at all, pleasanter than Alison's for the past week. 'Come, Ally, kiss your father! Things will be better than you think for, and Cheape a better husband than many a young spark.'

Alison was about to do as she was bid, when her quick ear caught a sound outside, and she started away from her father's arm.

'Listen, sir!' she cried, 'didn't you hear the sound of wheels? It seems like a chaise driving up.... Father,' she clutched the laird's sleeve, and turned upon him a piteous face, white with fear, 'it will not be Mr. Cheape come back?'

The laird shook her off, crossly; that frightened face gave a horrid prick to his conscience.

'Tut, girl,' he said, 'don't be a fool! Mr. Cheape, indeed! 'Tis you have been in disgrace, and don't know the news; indeed, I had forgotten it myself. Your mother has a friend—'tis a Mistress Maclehose of Edinburgh—comes to lie here for a night on her way back to the town, from a visit. Fine and put about your mother's been—to get the best room ready, and a dinner cooked, and all the best china out, and the silver candlesticks and the tea-set, and all without you. I was for having you down, but deil a bit! She's thrawn, is your mother, Ally, when the notion takes her! But it will be all right now—and there, I must away to bid welcome to this fine Edinburgh madam. She'll set you all the fashions, Ally, and so cheer up!' And the laird hustled off, well pleased with himself in the end. Ally listened to his heavy footsteps on the wooden stair, but did not follow him.

CHAPTER V.

It had been on the second or third day of Alison's incarceration that the mistress of The Mains had been thrown into a flutter by receiving a dispatch from her almost forgotten friend, Nancy Maclehose, craving a night's hospitality for old acquaintance' sake. The country lady now wished to make a good show before the urban one. She could not rival her in the fashions, or in modish gossip, but she could exhibit good store of silver and fine linen, and could set a feast before her of all the country delicacies.

'It'll be a queer thing if I'm not upsides wi' Nancy Maclehose,' she remarked, 'for all the belle that Nancy was; it didna bring her much.'

'Ay, ay, I remember her fine,' said the laird, 'nothing but a lassock when we married, wife—but "pretty Miss Nancy" then, though hardly ten. I mind her well when we were coortin', in the old Glasgow days—pretty Miss Nancy!'

'There'll be none o' the "Miss" and little of the "pretty" about her now, I'se warrant,' said Mrs. Graham, with meaning, 'a wife, and not a wife, and a widow, and not a widow. There's little to be proud o' there, that I can see.'

'Ay, they discorded, to be sure,' said the laird. 'Yet he was a fine sprig, young Maclehose, too. Ye'll mind all the clash about their coortin' you got from Glasgow? That was a neat trick of his about the coach—as neat a trick as ever a young buck played, to my thinking.'

'I never heed such clash,' said the lady, severely.

'Hoots!' said the laird. 'It was when miss was sent to Edinburgh to the school, being become too forward for her age, as all were well agreed, and Maclehose could not get acquaint with her, for all he had tried. So he ups and takes every place in the coach she was going by to Edinburgh, and so he got the lass to himself, and a bonny way to do it, too!'

'And what was the end of it all?' said Mrs. Graham, witheringly. 'If ye must tell thae tales before these lasses,'—they were, indeed, seated at table, and six pairs of ears were taking in with avidity these indiscreet revelations of love's audacity,—'it ill beseems you, the father of a family, to forget the lesson that's aye in them! But I'll tell ye what came o' all that havering trash o' coortin' in a coach, fast enough! They hadn't been married five years, when off goes the fine young buck to live among savages at the West Indies, and leaves his wife and bairns to charity at home. And that's love, misses! Love!' she continued, in tones of immeasurable scorn, 'love, indeed! A guid stick is a better name for it, for that's what it comes to in the end as often as not. I e'en wish your silly sister Alison was down here this minute to get this fine love story! It would do her good!'

And the mother of seven daughters, having pointed a moral with due emphasis, went off to count napkins out of the linen press. The six younger Miss Grahams then relaxed the solemnity of their listening countenances, and chattered among themselves of this tale of a lover and a coach, with a great impatience to behold its heroine.

That lady, meanwhile, in no very heroine-like mood, was being jolted towards The Mains in an old country post-chaise—an interminable cross-country journey along muddy by-roads, in the lashing rain and wind of the autumn day. She almost repented the impulse which had induced her to come out of her way to renew acquaintance with the friends of her girlhood. 'It's little but sad memories I'm like to get for my pains,' said she.

Stiff with long travel, cold, weary, and even wet, for the deluging rain dripped through the covering of the crazy old trap, she was landed at the door of The Mains in the murk of the evening, just as the laird descended the front stair from his daughter's room. What he saw was a little, slight woman's figure, covered from head to foot in a black hood and mantle, stepping in out of the dark, and receiving a genteel welcome from his excellent lady.

'Come in, come in,' the lady of The Mains was saying, standing in the hall, in her best silk dress, flanked by a shy daughter or two. 'You are welcome, Mrs. Maclehose—Nancy, it used to be!'

'It must be "Nancy" still, surely!' So sweet a voice it was that spoke, that the sudden contrast to the country lady's hearty tones was like the change from a trumpet to some delicate stringed instrument that thrills upon the ear. It was quite drowned in the laird's jovial welcome which ensued.

'Ay, it's not only "Nancy,"' said he, 'but "Pretty Miss Nancy"—we've not forgotten that, ma'am, not we!'

'Ah, little of that now, Mr. Graham!' and the speaker sighed and smiled; not a very deep sigh, and a very engaging smile. Mrs. Graham had now removed the travelling mantle from her guest's shoulders, and a dainty little figure of a woman stood forth, less considerably than the average height, and slender, but with a full slenderness that gave no hint of angularity or meagreness. Mrs. Maclehose, at eight-and-twenty, was not of the beauté éclatante which the public expects in one who is known to posterity as the idol of a love-poet. Hers was the kind of beauty that did not suit all tastes; for some, her mouth was too big, for others, her eyes made too much play, and these would say that she ogled. It was a fascination that she had rather than beauty, aided by her sweet voice, and soft, flattering ways; and over all there seemed to be a kind of innocent voluptuousness, which allured, even though you resented its allurement. Withal, her little person was daintiness itself; an oval, small face, velvety, soft, dark eyes, lips of a pomegranate redness that parted in bewitching smiles, little hands and dainty feet. Suddenly, beside her, the buxom lady of The Mains seemed coarse and blowsy, and all her rosy daughters to have wondrous clumsy waists, and thick red wrists. Such was Nancy Maclehose, on the very eve of her apotheosis—the 'gloriously amiable fine woman' of the enamoured Burns, the 'Clarinda' of so many a bombastic love-letter, and the 'Nanny' of songs that are sweet for all time.

But 'Clarinda' had not met her 'Sylvander' at this date, and was merely a little grass-widow, in rather doubtful circumstances, and a guest at The Mains. She tuned herself to her company with natural adaptability, and endured with heroism the massive hospitalities of a provincial evening. She was docile with the mistress of the house, and bewitching with its master; went through an introduction to six shy country girls, with a pretty word for each. She praised the china, and envied the silver; vowed no turkey ever tasted half so good, nor home-brewed ginger cordial half so luscious. And she meant it all, though all the time her delicate travel-tired limbs ached for bed, and she felt all the worst shivering premonitions of a bad cold; the chilly strangeness of a new-comer was upon her, and the low-roofed, rambling old house seemed dark and draughty and comfortless. The evening ended with a toddy-bowl, of which the contents forced the tears into her eyes; then the long-suffering guest was ushered into the glories of the best bedroom, and left in peace.

The firelight danced upon the walls, and upon the chintz hangings, with their shiny floral pattern. The best bed yawned for its occupant, but now she seemed in no mood to succumb to its allurements. She pulled a pink wrapper out of her trunk and put it on; and then out of the same receptacle came a certain book, and with this on her knee, and her chair pulled close to the fire, she sank into a fit of musing. The book was a manuscript book, elaborately bound, and fastening with a lock and key. It held verses; the fair reader conned a morsel, then with a pencil added or erased a word, her lips moving the while, and her smooth brow puckered into the frown of composition. Most assuredly the best bedroom at The Mains had never held a poetess before. Her soft mouth smiled to itself, and her great dark eyes flashed and shone in the firelight. The muse apparently was gracious. Presently, however, a sharp sneeze brought the lady's romantic meditations to a prosaic ending.

'As I'm alive,' said the little woman to herself, with a shiver, 'I have an influenza coming—and no wonder!' She got into the high bed and slipped between the glossy linen sheets, but then she could not sleep. The old house slept, but with many creakings to a super-sensitive ear: the whisper of the wind among the eaves and in the ivy, the rattle of a casement, the tinkling fall of ashes on the hearth. Now an owl hooted as it fled through the night, and now a rat scampered in the wall. Then a strange, puzzling noise teased the ear,—a sort of sliddering sound,—she could not guess its origin. It was only Alison's pigeons on the roof, trying to get a foot-hold on the slanting slates, and then slip, slipping down with an angry croon and flutter, to scramble up again, and so da capo.

'Perdition take the night and the noises!' muttered the guest, with a flounce among the sheets. Then she curled herself up, and felt a delicious drowsiness creeping on; but at that very instant came a new and unmistakable disturbance. Somebody in the room overhead began to sob and cry.

CHAPTER VI.

Nancy sat up in bed with a jerk, never less asleep in her life.

'Now, is there some ghost in this old barrack?' she asked herself. But the sound was too material for that; such a hard sobbing never came from ghostly throat.

'This is intolerable,' muttered Mrs. Maclehose; 'I cannot lie and listen to it; 'tis inhuman.' She got out of bed and slid her feet into little slippers that had high red heels and no backs to them. She threw on her wrapper, and taking the rush-light in her hand, opened the door softly and listened. The passage was dark and cold. To her left, a wooden stair led upwards. From that region the sobbing came. ''Tis some fellow-creature in distress,' thought the kind little guest. 'Most likely but some servant-lass in a scrape, and in terror of her mistress: God knows I'd be the same. I'll go up—a comforting word never came amiss.' She set forth, but the red heels made such a tap, tapping on the bare boards, that she was terrified; she slipped off her shoes and crept bare-foot up the stair. She knocked at the first door she came to, which was the right one. The sobbing ceased at once, but no one answered. Then she lifted the latch softly and looked in.

What she saw was the bare little room with the deep-set window where Alison slept with her little brother. The child's cot was beside her bed, empty, for her misbehaviour had deprived her of Jacky. Alison sat up in bed, so dazed by the light that she could scarcely see the little figure with bare feet, and in the pink wrapper, with the neat lacy night-cap over the dark hair. Nancy could much more advantageously see a grey-eyed girl whose face was wet with tears, and whose childish curls tumbled about her neck and ears.

'Now, this is no servant-lass,' said Mrs. Maclehose to herself, and then, aloud, 'My love, don't be frightened, I beg! I heard someone crying in the night, and thought I might be helpful. If 'tis an intrusion, forgive me, and I'll go away.' Alison stared at the speaker with parted lips.

'Who are you?' she murmured. The little lady laughed softly, closed the door gently, and came nearer, shading the light with her hand.

'You may well ask,' said she, 'since I only came to-day! But tell me first who you are—come!'

She deposited the rush-light on a chair, and plumping herself down on the edge of the bed, drew up her little bare feet under her, and peered into Alison's face with the most coaxing, the most beguiling, air in the world.

'I am Alison Graham,' stammered the daughter of the house.

'What! another of them?' cried Mrs. Maclehose, aghast; 'why, I saw a host—four—five—six; you're never a seventh, surely?'

'Yes,' said Alison, dolorously. 'There are seven of us: I am the oldest.'

'But you were not there, or spoken of,' persisted Mrs. Maclehose, scenting a mystery. 'Were you ill, love?' Alison turned her head away.

'No, not ill,' she said, truthful always, 'but—but my mother was not pleased with me, and so I was not down the stair.' Mrs. Maclehose put a soft little hand under Alison's chin, and turned the reluctant face towards her.

'Ah, child!' she said, ''tis some love trouble, never tell me it isn't! Tell me about it, for I am more learned in such than any other person in the world! I am an old friend of your mother's, but not so very old neither, in years, you know; and I am Nancy—Nancy Maclehose, to my sorrow. Now, come, out with it; 'tis a love tale—I know!'

'If it is,' cried Alison, between laughter and tears, but fairly won,' 'tis a love tale with no love in it, ma'am!'

'The very worst kind of all!' cried the confidante, serenely. 'And now, sure, I know all about it without being told! 'Tis some marriage they are forcing upon you for prudence' sake: some suitor—distasteful, old, uncouth—'

'Ah! they've been telling you,' murmured Alison, blushing.

'Not a word—I swear!' cried the vivacious little lady, enchanted at her own sagacity. 'But am I not right? A distasteful marriage, dictated by prudence; a fond heart that will have none of it, but faithful to another—'

'Ah! now there you are at fault,' began Alison, and then paused: why should she, to a perfect stranger, confess the humiliating fact that she had no lover, and no secret romance? But her native honesty prevailed.

'There is no "another,"' she murmured, shame-facedly.

'Some day there will be, then!' said Mrs. Maclehose, cheerfully, 'and you, be faithful to him, child!'

'Faithful?' cried Alison, wide-eyed. 'But I've never seen him, ma'am; he doesn't exist.'

'Ah! he does exist, somewhere—a kindred soul,' said the romantic visitor, nodding sagely. 'He is only waiting for the chance—the divine chance....'

'I doubt he will never get it at The Mains,' said the prosaic Alison.

'Faint heart!' cried Mrs. Maclehose. 'Believe in Love, the greatest of all the gods!'

Alison, never thus adjured before, looked doubtful.

'My mother and father tell me not to think about love,' she said, hesitatingly; 'they say 'tis a delusion.'

'They blaspheme, child!' cried the visitor, with energy. ''Tis love that has wrought me all the woe in my own span of life, God wot, yet I believe in him—believe in him still, with all my heart and soul.... But tell me, love,' she went on, breaking off in her rhapsody, 'who is it they would tie you to?'

''Tis a Mr. Cheape of Kincarley, in Fife,' said Alison, hanging her head. Mrs. Maclehose uttered a little trill of laughter.

'Oh, never, never, Mr. Cheape!' she tittered. 'Don't tell me 'tis the inevitable, the invincible, the inveterate Jimmy Cheape! ...'

'Then you know him?' cried Alison, eagerly.

'Oh, Lord, child!' said Mrs. Maclehose, 'who doesn't, dear? He has stumped the streets of Edinburgh, and every sizeable town in the country, in search of a wife this twenty years and more! Jimmy Cheape! No, Alison (for you'll let me call you Alison? I like you, child, and will love you, I know—'tis all arranged by our Fates). No, no! 'tis not you that are destined for Mr. Cheape; never think it!'

'I would not think it, if I could help it,' said the literal Alison. 'But 'tis all arranged—indeed it is—and my mother set upon it in her mind, and nothing will turn her.'

'I will turn her!' cried the lively little grass-widow, with her charming smile and a flash of her dark eyes.

'Will you?' said Alison, solemnly, leaning forward and gazing at her new friend with devouring, wondering eyes. 'How?'

A clock struck two. It was a timely diversion, and Mrs. Maclehose jumped down from the bed on to her little bare feet.

'Two of the clock!' she cried, 'and me with a cold creeping down the spine of my back like a rill of ice-water! I must away to my bed, love.'

'Ah!' cried Alison, 'how selfish of me to have kept you in a cold room, talking.'

''Twas I kept myself, dear,' said the visitor, lightly. 'Not the first foolish thing I have done in my life, or likely to be the last, either. Will you call me, Nancy, child, and kiss me good-night?'

'Sure,' cried Alison, 'I think you are a dream, a fairy, or an angel!' The dream put out its arms, took Alison's head into their embrace, and kissed her curls.

'We'll meet to-morrow,' she said, 'and then you'll see I'm no dream.' Then she paddled over the cold bare boards on those little feet, and casting a last bright look over her shoulder to Alison in the bed, she was gone. Alison watched the light in the crack under the door, until it grew fainter and fainter, and then disappeared. Then, not a little comforted, she turned round in her nest, and slept like a child.

The next morning, Alison ventured to take her usual place in the household, and was met with smiles.

'Now you are come to your senses, Alison,' her mother said, 'and you will live to thank me that I showed you the way. See here, now,' she went on, 'this fine Edinburgh madam that has come here while you were up yonder, has gotten an influenza that will keep her in her bed for a week, I'm thinking. Not that I grudge it her either, for it aye goes clean against the grain wi' me to have sheets soiled for the one night; I'd far sooner get the week's work out o' them. You must take madam's breakfast up, though, and make yourself civil, Ally. She was aye a clever, going-about body, Nancy, fine and gleg at the dressing of herself up. 'Tis a God-send her coming now. She'll set us in the fashions for your wedding, and show us how to sort my bonny silk.'

Alison shuddered; but she prepared the tray for the visitor's breakfast, and proceeded to take it upstairs, her heart beating fast with curiosity.

Under the flowered curtains of the best bed a little figure, still huddled in the pink wrapper, was gripped in the agueish shivering of an influenza cold. It started up, however, with unimpaired liveliness when Alison appeared.

'Ah, child,' she cried, 'I knew it would be you! Come, let us look at each other in the broad daylight. Why, what a Juno it is!' looking Alison up and down. 'What a great, big girl, to be topped by those baby curls.'

Alison came to the bed, pulled the tumbled coverlet straight, and shook up the pillows, with her sensible literal air.

'You are feverish, ma'am,' she said, 'and shouldn't talk. Here is a warm shawl my mother sends to hap about you, and she says, please, will you keep still and warm, and she will bring you a hot posset presently.' The invalid laughed in the grave, girlish face.

'Oh, Solomon!' she said, 'and do you expect me to obey your good mother, and do the wise thing at the wise moment? You little know poor Nannie yet.' Her dark, bright eyes grew full of sadness for a moment, and she had the air of some pretty, soft, appealing little animal—a kitten, perhaps—checked in its play by a hurt. 'I want to talk,' she said, 'to talk, and talk, and talk. We must, you know, Alison, so as to see how we are to outwit Mr. Cheape.'

'When you are better,' said Alison, 'we will talk. I doubt you will hear plenty of Mr. Cheape,' she added, soberly.

At this moment a diversion occurred of a sufficiently prosaic nature to defer further confidences of a sentimental kind. The driver of the chaise in which Mrs. Maclehose had arrived the night before sent a message to say that he could wait no longer, but must return whence he came, and to that end he must be paid.

'Here, reach me my reticule, dear,' said the invalid to Alison, and she hunted in the dainty velvet bag for her purse, and in the purse for the necessary coin. This, however, did not appear to be instantly forthcoming. A slight frown ruffled her forehead, and the faintest flush rose on her cheek. ''Tis most provoking, Ally,' she said. 'I have run short. Will you run and ask your father, love, to pay the man for me, and I will this day write for more money to my cousin Herries, in Edinburgh, who manages my affairs. You see I trusted to be back in town immediately, and that's how I've let myself run into so beggarly a state.' She laughed lightly; her embarrassment was gone.

Alison duly ran down to her father, who paid two guineas to the driver, cocking his eye to himself as he did so.

'Women's debts!' he remarked within his own mind. 'It's little likely I'll ever see the colour of that again.' And it may here be mentioned, as a little matter strictly between him and the reader, that he never did.

CHAPTER VII.

As the sagacious mistress of The Mains had foretold, the influenza kept Mrs. Maclehose in bed for a week. Fever succeeded ague, and cold and headache followed in their wake, and it was, for some days, a very sick little woman indeed, that tossed and tumbled between the linen sheets, under the flowered hangings of the best room. Alison waited upon her with a patience and prudence that had presently their own effect upon the volatile nature of the invalid; these solid, good qualities in the country girl seemed to have a singular fascination for the little town lady, in whose character, it is to be feared, they were conspicuously lacking. Alison, on her part, felt also curiously drawn to her guest. This delicate little personage, with all her pretty belongings, her petulant temper, and pretty ways, was a new type at The Mains. Simple Alison felt it a privilege to wait upon one so fine and dainty. She could lift her in her bed as though she were a child, and both her tiny hands could lie in Alison's one palm, and be spanned by a finger and thumb. And yet Alison felt there were more wits in one finger tip of this little lady than perhaps in the heads of everybody else at The Mains put together. Were there not poetry books upon her dressing-table, and did she not, indeed, write poetry herself? Alison had been for one year at a young ladies' seminary in the town of Stirling; but even the 'finish' imparted by this experience, could not diminish in her a sense of awe at the literary accomplishments of her new friend. But I think it was the storming of her confidence on that first night of their acquaintance that really impressed Alison with a sense of the new-comer's cleverness and power. To the intensely reserved, there is something almost preternatural in those qualities in another which overcome and overleap that reserve. And then Mrs. Maclehose knew all about Mr. Cheape! Secretly, but not very hopefully, for Alison's was not a sanguine nature, she hoped for deliverance from her threatened bondage, a deliverance that the cleverness of her new friend should effect.

The first moment she could sit up in her bed, Mrs. Maclehose demanded pens and paper, and said she must write letters.

'Could I not write for you, anything that's necessary?' Alison asked. 'You are still so weak.' The invalid shook her head and smiled.

'Ally,' she said, 'you don't know, or you don't realise, I expect, that I'm a mother, and there are my two poor little men all alone in Edinburgh town, wondering what has happened to their mammy.'

'Your two little boys,' cried Alison, eagerly. 'I'd like to know about them. Are they bigger than Jacky?'

'Lud, child, yes, I should think so!' said the fond mother, with, perhaps, a slightly-discontented air. 'Monsters of eight and ten years old! At least, Willy is a well-grown monster, the eldest. The younger is small; he's in but a crazy state of health, God help him! I know not what to make of it.' She moved uncomfortably in the bed, as if the thought goaded her. 'For the bairns, or their servant, Jean, I daresay you could scratch me a line, Ally,' she went on, 'but I've other and more solemn letters in hand. You must know I have one most sapient and noble cousin, Archibald Herries, a writer to His Majesty's Signet, who lives in the town, and to him must I render grave and solemn account of myself, with a prayer for monies, Ally, of the which I stand in parlous need at the present moment.'

'To be sure I could not write that letter,' Alison acquiesced. Her patient, with a chin supported on a little white hand, was regarding her attentively. 'Do you know, Ally,' said she, 'you are rather like my cousin Archie yourself, a sort of Solomon, all the virtues and all the wisdoms and sobrieties combined.'

'Then you don't seem to like him much,' said Alison, with a pout.

'May God forgive me for an ungrateful and most base wretch, if I do not!' cried her friend, with unexpected energy. 'For of all the debts dependent women ever owed to protecting man, mine to my cousin Archie is the greatest. I should have been in the street, and my poor babes in the gutter long since, but for him. And that's the truth, Ally, and the plain truth. He who is my natural protector, bound to me by all the most sacred laws of God and man, chose to desert me, and leave me to the care, and even the charity, of others. God be the judge between us! I swear I was guiltless in that matter, and indeed guilt has never been imputed tome. Do you believe it, Ally?'

'Sure, I believe it with all my heart and soul,' cried Alison, with kindling eyes.

'And there spoke an enthusiasm and a trusting warmth of nature that were never Archie's, dear,' said Mrs. Maclehose, laughing once more. 'No, you are not like him, love. 'Tis for a coldness of nature, a perpetual suspicion that I blame him. He's not a kindred soul, and we are ever tacitly at war. God knows poor Nancy is no saint. But he misjudges me ever, and the injustice pricks. But there, that's enough. Let me get finished with this proper, virtuous, tiresome letter.'

In the long evenings of convalescence this seemingly ill-assorted pair were drawn closer and closer together in the links of their sudden friendship.

'Sing to me as you sing to Jacky, love,' Nancy would say, nestling down among the pillows. And in the gloaming of the quiet room, Alison, folding her hands in her lap, would sing in her sweet deep-throated voice those peculiarly poignant ballads of love and longing and loyalty, with which, since the memorable ''45,' the whole of Scotland was flooded.

'Where got you that trick of song, love?' Mrs. Maclehose would ask, sentimentally, 'since you say you have never loved?'

'I had one dozen of singing lessons at the school,' replied the ever-practical Alison, 'and I had begun to the harp before I left.'

'Was it that year of school made you different to your sisters, think you, Ally?'

'Am I different?' asked Alison, wonderingly.

'Oh, I would not miscall the honest lasses,' cried Nancy, 'they are all good and sweet, I am sure. But about you there is a difference—a gentler accent, a shade of softness—I know not what.'

''Twas a very genteel school, indeed,' said Alison, respectfully. 'But it was too dear. So I only stayed but the one year, instead of three, and poor Kate and Maggie never got at all.'

'You'd be a treasure, with that "wood-note wild" of yours to our bard, Ally!'

'Our bard?' inquired Alison, not at all certain what a bard might be.

'Ay,' said Nancy, with a kindling eye. 'Our bard, but not ours only! The world's poet—the singer for all time, and for all hearts—Robert Burns! Child, haven't you heard of him, the ploughman poet?'

'A ploughman?' said Alison, conjuring up the vision of one Donald, the ploughman at The Mains, with his stubbly beard and bowed legs.

'A ploughman, yes,' cried Nancy, 'but what a ploughman! He has had the town at his feet, Ally! From the highest to the lowest in the land, all men do him honour. And as for the women, child, they are ready to kill each other for a glint of his eye! The very duchesses hang about him, and there's not a titled lady that will not sorn upon and flatter him to get him to her tea-table. Never has the town gone so mad about a man before!'

'And have you often seen him?' asked Alison.

'To my lasting sorrow and vexation, never!' cried Nancy, vehemently; 'and, oh, Ally, 'tis the one burning wish—the longing of my heart! And there's that insensible wretch, my cousin Herries, who has the entry almost everywhere the poet goes, and last winter saw him almost nightly, and he scorns the privilege that I would sell my soul for! Him have I plagued, and others have I plagued, to get me known to my idol; but in vain, as yet! It will come, though! Never was so ardent a wish that did not bring its own fulfilment, ay, and its own punishment too, sometimes,' she added, with a sudden wistfulness. 'Ally, you never have these passions, these rebellious cravings, do you, child?'

'Sure, never,' said Alison, soberly, 'and never would, I think.'

'But I'm made up of them!' cried the little woman, 'and nothing stays me—no scruple, no prudence—when they are hot within me! Know this of your friend, Ally, and be warned in time. I wish you to know me as I really am. Nature has been kind to me in some respects, but one essential she has denied me utterly: it is that instantaneous perception of the fit and unfit, which is so useful in the conduct of life. But you are rich in this, Ally, and that is why I think that you might be my friend, and sometimes save me from myself.'

'I will be your friend,' said Alison, softly, 'though, sure, there never was a humbler one!'

Thus would these two swear an eternal friendship, over and over again. Alison heard more, also—heard a great deal, indeed, about the wondrous ploughman poet, whose image seemed to possess the ardent imagination of her friend. There was a certain little brownish, roughly-bound book amongst those which were wont to litter the coverlet of the best bed. It had a dog's-eared and most ungenteel appearance, but it was the Kilmarnock edition of the poems of Robert Burns, and had its letters been in gold and its binding of scented satin, it would not, in the then inflamed state of public adulation of the poet, have been too richly dressed. To the contents of this little book Alison listened, with a sort of tingling in her blood. She had a nature full of unuttered music, and she had been born and bred among those simple country scenes of her native land, whence the poet drew his inspiration. So he became, as he had become to thousands of his tongue-tied, voiceless, and strenuous countrymen and countrywomen, the very mouthpiece of her soul; and thus, long before a tangled thread from this man's chequered destiny became in-woven with the simple web of her own life, Alison got her first knowledge of Robert Burns.

But, in the meantime, the gay little invalid at The Mains, announced herself cured, and, in a cloud of pink wrapper and enveloping shawl, tottered from bed to the arm-chair by the fire.

'And, now, Ally,' she cried, 'now that my spirits are come again, now for your good mother and Mr. Cheape!'

CHAPTER VIII.

The task which the romantic Mrs. Maclehose had set herself in regard to Alison, was one entirely after her own heart. She considered herself a past-mistress in all things relating to the tender passion; and though she herself had met with signal and disastrous shipwreck amid the shoals of matrimony, there was nothing in life that interested her like affairs of the heart. On this occasion, indeed, it was the marring, and not the making, of a match, that she had in hand. But what mission could be more legitimate, what endeavour more congenial, than that of helping to liberate a young and interesting friend from the horrid bondage of a loveless contract? That the mistress of The Mains viewed the matter from a different standpoint, she was, of course, aware; in her fertile brain she had arranged a plan of warfare, and went to the battle wreathed in smiles.

The lady of the house herself opened the campaign; by marching into the invalid's room one morning with an armful of silk—the wedding silk, which she spread forth before her guest.

'Ye were ay a handy body at the clothes, Nancy,' she observed. 'Now tell me how to sort this silk for Alison, in the newest modes.'

'Ah! your lovely Alison—how interesting!' murmured the guest, sweetly.

'Alison's well enough,' said her impartial parent, coolly. 'We think her none so lovely here—a good girl, but homely; none the less likely to make a good wife to an honest gentleman.'

'To be sure, to be sure,' said Mrs. Maclehose, in a sprightly tone, 'a little bird has told me of that interesting matter!'

'Then it needna have fashed itself,' said Mrs. Graham, alluding to the feathered purveyor of secrets, 'for I was fair bursting to speak of it myself. 'Tis a most extraordinary piece of good fortune to us, this substantial offer for a tocherless lass like Alison. I cannot get over it yet, myself.'

'And yet, Alison'—said the guest cautiously, 'Alison herself does not speak of the matter with the enthusiasm one expects in a young heart on such an occasion.'

'Do you gather grapes from thorns or figs from thistles?' inquired Mrs. Graham, contemptuously. 'No, nor sense from glaikit lasses! Alison's a fool, and doesna ken what's good for her. But—' grimly—'I've been teaching her, and she'll learn yet!'

'And the gentleman, ma'am?' inquired Nancy, casually, 'I protest I have hardly heard his name?'

''Tis one most excellent respectit laird,' said Mrs. Graham, swelling visibly with the importance of the announcement, 'one Mr. Cheape of Kincarley in the county of—' But here Nancy broke in upon her with a sharp titter, which, however, she had the appearance of politely suppressing. Mrs. Graham looked at her sharply.

'What's wrong wi' you?' she sarcastically inquired.

'Oh, la, ma'am! nothing, I assure you,' said Nancy, in an obvious struggle with a mirthful tendency, 'only Mr. Cheape—ha—ha—' and she tailed off into a giggle.

'What dirty gossip o' the gutters ha' ye got about the man?' said Mrs. Graham, with rising anger and a flashing eye, 'out with your scandal, if ye must!'

'Oh, scandal, lud, ma'am, no!' said Nancy. 'Scandal and poor Jimmy Cheape were never named together, only—'

'Only what,' cried the irate lady of The Mains, with a stamp of her big foot.

'Well, ma'am,' said Nancy, coyly, 'I'd sooner bite my tongue out, sure, than that it should meddle with Miss Alison's good fortune. Only, since you ask me, it does surprise me that so distinguished a family as Graham of The Mains shouldn't look higher for their eldest daughter than poor Jimmy Cheape.'

'A distinguished family,' said Mrs. Graham, with a mincing mimicry of her guest's tone, 'a distinguished family wi' seven daughters has to take what it can get. It can ill afford genteel ideas like yours, Nancy,' with somewhat withering significance. 'But what's wrong wi' Mr. Cheape, to your fine notions, may I ask?'

'Well, ma'am, since you will have it,' said Nancy, with an air of reluctant candour, 'simply that he's the leavings of so many other folk,—that's all.'

'Oh, is he, indeed?' said Mrs. Graham, with fine sarcasm.

''Tis so old a tale, indeed,' pursued Nancy, pictorially, 'that it stretches back clean and away beyond my poor memory. But even to my knowledge, Jimmy Cheape has been the rejected of ladies more than I can count, and such as are not worthy to tie the shoes of Miss Alison.'

'Oh, ay!' commented Mrs. Graham, with a vicious eye upon her informant. 'Well?'

'There was Jenny M'Lure,' continued Nancy, with a reminiscent air. 'All of one winter he was after her, not that she would look at him though, and the whole town laughing and looking on. And then there was Molly Baleny—she might have had him, for she was near forty and no beauty, but she put him to the door too. And there was Jean M'Gregor, the cutler's daughter, you know, in Nicol Street; a fine dance she led him, the hussy—for, after all, a laird was a bit of a string to her bow. But, of course, she gave him the go-by in the end, and, in my opinion, she was heartless in the way she held up an old man like that to be the jest of the town: 'twas no womanly behaviour. And there were others, I assure you; he's been on his knees to some girl or another in the public park, 'twas the season's great joke, but I forget her name. 'Tis not that he's wicked or a man of ill-conduct in any way, ma'am—but he is so comical, and no woman will marry a man that is a laughing-stock.'

'Will she no?' said Mrs. Graham, with a darting eye. 'But some'll take a wastrel, and no be able to keep him when they've got him!' Nancy winced visibly under this vigorous blow, from no uncertain arm. 'My woman!' her hostess proceeded, 'if I find you setting Ally against her beau, it's the door you'll be shown, and that in a hurry! She's got to take Mr. Cheape, or she's got to beg. There's some's content to beg, but it'll no be my daughter!' And the lady of The Mains, gathering up the wedding silk, and with her head in the air, marched out of the room.

Nancy sank back in her chair, worsted, she felt, in this encounter.

'Your good mother, Ally,' she said to her friend, when Alison, appeared, 'is somewhat bludgeon-like in her methods of war. My poor little weapons are too fine.' Alison smiled rather wanly.

'Our mother is very strong in her wishes, and the getting of them,' she remarked. ''Tis not easy to move her.'

'Ah, but wait till I get at your father,' cried Nancy, recovering her spirits. 'I'm a wonderful hand with the men.'

'My mother is angry with you now,' said Alison, quietly, 'and with me too. She has put me to the clear-starching with the maids in the laundry, all the afternoon, for fear I should sit with you.'

'Oh, ho!' said Nancy, 'sets the wind in that quarter? But we'll see whose cleverest yet. Keep a good heart, Ally—you'll not marry Mr. Cheape!' But Alison shook her head despondently, and vanished. There were no more twilight talks and songs in the gloamings after that.

Thus matters remained at a standstill for several days, and Nancy chafed under the well-meant but awkward attentions of Kate and Maggie, who were sent to take Alison's place in the best room, about the invalid. She longed to be gone. The dreariness of the country at this season depressed the little townswoman, and she settled a day in her mind for her departure.

'But I'll save that child from her virago of a mother,' she said to herself, with determination, 'even if I have to carry her off with me by force. Though where,' she added, with a little grimace to herself, 'though where I'm to put the big creature, if I take her, Lord only knows! Is there a corner of my garret she can sleep in? Well, Providence must see to that!'

Nancy was never frustrated in a kind action by so paltry a detail. The charming vision of herself in the blotched old mirror—she was at her first toilette—smiled back at her approvingly, with the humid sparkle of her long, soft, dark eyes. She was about to try her arts on the laird.

CHAPTER IX.

The mistress of The Mains, having mounted the gig, was away to the weekly butter market; Alison was invisible, set, in a distant corner of the house, upon some interminable domestic task. Nancy opened her door, peeped out, and listened; the house was quiet. The laird, she knew, was within and at her mercy, for she had heard he had the rheumatics in his back, and could not go forth in the damp. She tripped away down the passage, and by peeping into one room after another, at last found the library, and the laird in it.

'Here's the den,' she cried, gaily, 'and the lion within!' And she looked up into her host's rugged face with those eyes of hers, which no man in his senses could resist, saving, indeed, a certain legal gentleman, in Edinburgh, of a hard heart.

The laird was in a doleful mood, inclined to those modified views of the desirability of life which are fostered in a man by a touch of lumbago. He stood with his back to the green-washed mantelpiece, with its pessimistic motto, and his countenance was dourly set. It, however, melted in a smile at the sight of his guest, as, indeed, that guest intended that it should.

'And now I'm come to have a confidential talk with you,' said she, ensconcing herself in his big chair, and shaking a finger at him. ''Tis of your daughter, Alison. Laird, it can never be that a man like you gives his daughter to a man like Jimmy Cheape!'

'Sells her, you mean,' said the laird, sourly. He was indeed Alison's father, from whom she had taken her own direct, literal ways of thought and speech. ''Tis true, we have sold the lass.'

'For shame—for shame!' cried Nancy. 'Your best and bonniest! I'll not stand by and see it done. Sure as I'm a woman, I forbid the banns, and will prevent it!'

'You'd need be quick, then,' said the laird, with a short sarcastic laugh. 'Ally doesn't know it, for her mother keeps it quiet as yet, but the man comes to-morrow s'en-night, and expects to find all ready for the marriage.'

'Lord-a-mercy! then we must act promptly, indeed!' said Nancy. 'I'm not without a practical suggestion in the matter, I assure you. Instead of giving the lassie to old Cheape, like a tit-bit to an ogre, give her to me. Do you hear, laird?'

'Ay, I hear,' said the laird, laconically. 'I would if I could, mistress, for my stomach rises at this marriage. But the wife is set on a husband for Ally.'

'I'll get her another,' cried Nancy, eagerly. 'The town's full of sparks, and to spare!'

'A bird in hand is worth two in the bush, the wife would tell you,' said the laird, with a sorry smile. 'Besides, there's money between old Cheape and me. I cannot back out of the bargain now.'

'Tut, he'll never mind the money!' cried Nancy. 'He's been a lender to half the fathers, brothers, uncles, and guardians in Scotland; for 'tis the only way he can get word with a woman. It's second nature to him to get the go-by, and if he misses Ally, he'll take up with one of her sisters in the twinkling of an eye.'

''Tis easy to be speaking to me,' said the laird, grimly. 'Why don't you speak to the mistress? 'Tis her business rather than mine, surely?'

'She's not to be moved,' said Nancy, demurely. 'But, laird, that which cannot be done by force, can often be done by guile. Are you willing, in your heart of hearts, to be off with this marriage? I know you are!'

'I am,' said the laird, rather heavily, for his conscience spoke at last.

'Well, give me a hand, and 'twill be done!' said Nancy. 'I leave this place in four days, and a man and chaise from C—— take me to Green Loaning to get the Edinburgh coach—isn't that so? And I must leave this door in the dark of the morning, before six? Isn't that the case?'

'Ay is it,'—said the laird, 'an awkward start.'

'Make it yet an hour awkwarder,' cried Nancy. 'And let no one know the time, save Ally and me, and you. Let the chaise be at the outer gate, and we'll slip down and be off before a soul's stirring. Is the mistress a good sleeper?'