Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume I Part 13

Lindsay. I must be a preacher like John Knox, you know--like the great John Knox, the reformer of a nation--and Mr. Lindsay knows all about him. A chair, Margaret, for Mr. Lindsay."

I am not ashamed to say it was with tears, and in a voice faltering with emotion, that I apologized to the poor woman for my intrusion at such a time. Were it otherwise, I might well conclude my heart had grown hard as a piece of the nether millstone.

"I had known Robert at College," I said--"had loved and respected him; and had now come to pay him a visit, after an absence of several months, wholly unprepared for finding him in his present condition." And it would seem that my tears pled for me, and proved to the poor afflicted woman and her daughter, by far the most efficient part of my apology.

"All my friends have left me now, Mr. Lindsay," said the unfortunate poet--"they have all left me now; they love this present world. We were all going down, down, down; there was the roll of a river behind us; it came bursting over the high rocks, roaring, rolling, foaming down upon us; and though the fog was thick and dark below--far below, in the place to which we were going--I could see the red fire s.h.i.+ning through--the red, hot, unquenchable fire; and we were all going down, down, down.

Mother, mother, tell Mr. Lindsay I am going to be put on my trials to-morrow. Careless creature that I am--life is short, and I have lost much time; but I am going to be put on my trials to-morrow, and shall come forth a preacher of the word."

The thunder which had hitherto been muttering at a distance--each peal, however, nearer and louder than the preceding one--now began to roll overhead, and the lightning, as it pa.s.sed the window, to illumine every object within. The hapless poet stretched out his thin wasted arm, as if addressing a congregation from the pulpit:--

"There were the flas.h.i.+ngs of lightning," he said, "and the roll of thunder; and the trumpet waxed louder and louder. And around the summit of the mountain were the foldings of thick clouds, and the shadow fell brown and dark over the wide expanse of the desert. And the wild beasts lay trembling in their dens. But, lo! where the sun breaks through the opening of the cloud, there is the glitter of tents--the glitter of ten thousand tents that rise over the sandy waste, thick as waves of the sea. And there, there is the voice of the dance and of the revel, and the winding of horns and the clash of cymbals. Oh, sit nearer me, dearest mother, for the room is growing dark, dark; and, oh, my poor head!

'The lady sat on the castle wa', Look'd ower baith dale and down, And then she spied Gil-Morice head Come steering through the town.'

Do, dearest mother, put your cool hand on my brow, and do hold it fast ere it part. How fearfully--oh, how fearfully it aches!--and oh, how it thunders!" He sunk backward on the pillow, apparently exhausted. "Gone, gone, gone," he muttered; "my mind gone for ever. But G.o.d's will be done."

I rose to leave the room; for I could restrain my feelings no longer.

"Stay, Mr. Lindsay," said the poet, in a feeble voice; "I hear the rain das.h.i.+ng on the pavement; you must not go till it abates. Would that you could pray beside me!--but, no--you are not like the dissolute companions who have now all left me, but you are not yet fitted for that; and, alas! I cannot pray for myself. Mother, mother, see that there be prayers at my lykewake; for--

'Her lykewake, it was piously spent In social prayer and praise, Performed by judicious men, Who stricken were in days.

'And many a heavy, heavy heart Was in that mournful place; And many a weary, weary thought On her who slept in peace.'

They will come all to my lykewake, mother, won't they?--yes, all, though they have left me now. Yes, and they will come far to see my grave. I was poor, very poor, you know, and they looked down upon me; and I was no son or cousin of theirs, and so they could do nothing for me. Oh, but they might have looked less coldly! But they will all come to my grave, mother; they will come all to my grave; and they will say--'Would he were living now to know how kind we are!' But they will look as coldly as ever on the living poet beside them--yes, till they have broken his heart; and then they will go to his grave too. O dearest mother, do lay your cool hand on my brow."

He lay silent and exhausted, and, in a few minutes, I could hope, from the hardness of his breathing, that he had fallen asleep.

"How long," I inquired of his sister, in a low whisper, "has Mr.

Ferguson been so unwell, and what has injured his head?"

"Alas!" said the girl, "my brother has been unsettled in mind for nearly the last six months. We first knew it one evening on his coming home from the country, where he had been for a few days with a friend. He burnt a large heap of papers that he had been employed on for weeks before--songs and poems that his friends say were the finest things he ever wrote; but he burnt them all, for he was going to be a preacher of the word, he said, and it did not become a preacher of the word to be a writer of light rhymes. And, O sir! his mind has been carried ever since; but he has been always gentle and affectionate, and his sole delight has lain in reading the Bible. Good Dr. Erskine, of the Greyfriars, often comes to our house, and sits with him for hours together; for there are times when his mind seems stronger than ever, and he says wonderful things, that seem to hover, the minister says, between the extravagance natural to his present sad condition, and the higher flights of a philosophic genius. And we had hoped that he was getting better; but, O sir, our hopes have had a sad ending. He went out, a few evenings ago, to call on an old acquaintance; and, in descending a stair, missed footing, and fell to the bottom; and his head has been fearfully injured by the stones. He has been just as you have seen him ever since; and, oh! I much fear he cannot now recover. Alas!

my poor brother!--never, never was there a more affectionate heart."

CHAPTER VII.

"A lowly muse!

She sings of reptiles yet in song unknown."

I returned to the vessel with a heavy heart; and it was nearly three months from this time ere I again set foot in Edinburgh. Alas! for my unfortunate friend! He was now an inmate of the asylum, and on the verge of dissolution. I was thrown, by accident, shortly after my arrival at this time, into the company of one of his boon companions. I had gone into a tavern with a brother sailor--a shrewd, honest skipper, from the north country; and, finding the place occupied by half a dozen young fellows, who were growing noisy over their liquor, I would have immediately gone out again, had I not caught, in the pa.s.sing, a few words regarding my friend. And so, drawing to a side-table, I sat down.

"Believe me," said one of the topers, a dissolute-looking young man, "it's all over with Bob Ferguson--all over; and I knew it from the moment he grew religious. Had old Brown tried to convert me, I would have broken his face."

"What Brown?" inquired one of his companions.

"Is that all you know?" rejoined the other. "Why, John Brown of Haddington, the Seceder. Bob was at Haddington last year, at the election; and, one morning, when in the horrors, after holding a rum night of it, who should he meet in the churchyard but old John Brown?--he writes, you know, a big book on the Bible. Well, he lectured Bob at a pretty rate, about election and the call, I suppose; and the poor fellow has been mad ever since. Your health, Jamie. For my own part, I'm a freewill man, and detest all cant and humbug."

"And what has come of Ferguson now?" asked one of the others.

"Oh, mad, sir, mad," rejoined the toper--"reading the Bible all day, and cooped up in the asylum yonder. 'Twas I who brought him to it.--But, lads, the gla.s.s has been standing for the last half-hour.--'Twas I and Jack Robinson who brought him to it, as I say. He was getting wild; and so we got a sedan for him, and trumped up a story of an invitation for tea from a lady, and he came with us as quietly as a lamb. But, if you could have heard the shriek he gave when the chair stopped, and he saw where we had brought him! I never heard anything half so horrible--it rang in my ears for a week after; and then, how the mad people in the upper rooms howled and gibbered in reply, till the very roof echoed!

People say he is getting better; but, when I last saw him, he was as religious as ever, and spoke so much about heaven, that it was uncomfortable to hear him. Great loss to his friends, after all the expense they have been at with his education."

"You seem to have been intimate with Mr. Ferguson," I said.

"Oh, intimate with Bob!" he rejoined; "we were hand and glove, man. I have sat with him in Lucky Middlema.s.s's, almost every evening, for two years; and I have given him hints for some of the best things in his book. 'Twas I who tumbled down the cage in the Meadows, and began breaking the lamps.

'Ye who oft finish care in Lethe's cup, Who love to swear and roar, and _keep it up_, List to a brother's voice, whose sole delight Is sleep all day, and riot all the night.'

There's spirit for you! But Bob was never sound at bottom; and I have told him so. 'Bob,' I have said, 'Bob, you're but a hypocrite after all, man--without half the s.p.u.n.k you pretend to. Why don't you take a pattern by me, who fear nothing, and believe only the agreeable? But, poor fellow, he had weak nerves, and a church-going propensity that did him no good; and you see the effects. 'Twas all nonsense, Tom, of his throwing the squib into the Gla.s.site meeting-house. Between you and I, that was a cut far beyond him in his best days, poet as he was. 'Twas I who did it, man, and never was there a cleaner row in auld Reekie."

"Heartless, contemptible puppy!" said my comrade, the sailor, as we left the room. "Your poor friend must be ill, indeed, if he be but half as insane as his quondam companion. But he cannot: there is no madness like that of the heart. What could have induced a man of genius to a.s.sociate with a thing so thoroughly despicable?"

"The same misery, Miller," I said, "that brings a man _acquainted with strange bedfellows_."

CHAPTER VIII.

"O thou, my elder brother in misfortune, By far my elder brother in the muses, With tears I pity thy unhappy fate!"--BURNS.

The asylum in which my unfortunate friend was confined, at this time the only one in Edinburgh, was situated in an angle of the city wall. It was a dismal-looking mansion, shut in on every side, by the neighbouring houses, from the view of the surrounding country; and so effectually covered up from the nearer street, by a large building in front, that it seemed possible enough to pa.s.s a lifetime in Edinburgh without coming to the knowledge of its existence. I shuddered as I looked up to its blackened walls, thinly sprinkled with miserable-looking windows, barred with iron, and thought of it as a sort of burial-place of dead minds.

But it was a Golgotha, which, with more than the horrors of the grave, had neither its rest nor its silence. I was startled, as I entered the cell of the hapless poet, by a shout of laughter from a neighbouring room, which was answered from a dark recess behind me, by a fearfully prolonged shriek, and the clanking of chains. The mother and sister of Ferguson were sitting beside his pallet, on a sort of stone settle which stood out from the wall; and the poet himself, weak and exhausted, and worn to a shadow, but apparently in his right mind, lay extended on the straw. He made an attempt to rise as I entered; but the effort was above his strength, and, again lying down, he extended his hand.

"This is kind, Mr. Lindsay," he said; "it is ill for me to be alone in these days; and yet I have few visitors, save my poor old mother and Margaret. But who cares for the unhappy?"

I sat down on the settle beside him, still retaining his hand. "I have been at sea, and in foreign countries," I said, "since I last saw you, Mr. Ferguson, and it was only this morning I returned; but believe me there are many, many of your countrymen who sympathize sincerely in your affliction, and take a warm interest in your recovery."

He sighed deeply. "Ah," he replied, "I know too well the nature of that sympathy. You never find it at the bedside of the sufferer--it evaporates in a few barren expressions of idle pity; and yet, after all, it is but a paying the poet in kind. He calls so often on the world to sympathize over fict.i.tious misfortune, that the feeling wears out, and becomes a mere mood of the imagination; and, with this light, attenuated pity of his own weaving, it regards his own real sorrows. Dearest mother, the evening is damp and chill--do gather the bedclothes round me, and sit on my feet; they are so very cold and so dead, that they cannot be colder a week hence."

"O Robert, why do you speak so?" said the poor woman, as she gathered the clothes round him, and sat on his feet. "You know you are coming home to-morrow."

"To-morrow!" he said--"if I see to-morrow, I shall have completed my twenty-fourth year--a small part, surely, of the threescore and ten; but what matters it when 'tis past?"

"You were ever, my friend, of a melancholy temperament," I said, "and too little disposed to hope. Indulge in brighter views of the future, and all shall yet be well."

"I can now hope that it shall," he said. "Yes, all shall be well with me--and that very soon. But, oh, how this nature of ours shrinks from dissolution!--yes, and all the lower natures too. You remember, mother, the poor starling that was killed in the room beside us? Oh, how it struggled with its ruthless enemy, and filled the whole place with its shrieks of terror and agony. And yet, poor little thing! it had been true, all life long, to the laws of its nature, and had no sins to account for, and no judge to meet. There is a shrinking of heart as I look before me, and yet I can hope that all shall yet be well with me--and that very soon. Would that I had been wise in time! Would that I had thought more and earlier of the things which pertain to my eternal peace! more of a living soul, and less of a dying name! But, oh, 'tis a glorious provision, through which a way of return is opened up even at the eleventh hour!"

We sat round him in silence; an indescribable feeling of awe pervaded my whole mind, and his sister was affected to tears.

"Margaret," he said, in a feeble voice--"Margaret, you will find my Bible in yonder little recess; 'tis all I have to leave you; but keep it, dearest sister, and use it, and, in times of sorrow and suffering that come to all, you will know how to prize the legacy of your poor brother. Many, many books do well enough for life; but there is only one of any value when we come to die.

"You have been a voyager of late, Mr. Lindsay," he continued, "and I have been a voyager too. I have been journeying in darkness and discomfort, amid strange unearthly shapes of dread and horror, with no reason to direct and no will to govern. Oh, the unspeakable unhappiness of these wanderings!--these dreams of suspicion, and fear, and hatred, in which shadow and substance, the true and the false, were so wrought up and mingled together, that they formed but one fantastic and miserable whole. And, oh! the unutterable horror of every momentary return to a recollection of what I had been once, and a sense of what I had become! Oh, when I awoke amid the terrors of the night--when I turned me on the rustling straw, and heard the wild wail and yet wilder laugh--when I heard and shuddered, and then felt the demon in all his might coming over me, till I laughed and wailed with the others--oh the misery! the utter misery!--But 'tis over, my friend--'tis all over; a few, few tedious days, a few, few weary nights, and all my sufferings shall be over."

I had covered my face with my hands, but the tears came bursting through my fingers; the mother and sister of the poet sobbed aloud.