The night had come; the fanlight over the door shone bright;
the two windows of the dining-room where the cloth was being
laid, and the three windows of the drawing-room where Maria
would be waiting dinner, glowed softlier through yellow
blinds.  It was like a vision of the past.  All this time of
his absence life had gone forward with an equal foot, and the
fires and the gas had been lighted, and the meals spread, at
the accustomed hours.  At the accustomed hour, too, the bell
had sounded thrice to call the family to worship.  And at the
thought, a pang of regret for his demerit seized him; he
remembered the things that were good and that he had
neglected, and the things that were evil and that he had
loved; and it was with a prayer upon his lips that he mounted
the steps and thrust the key into the key-hole.

He stepped into the lighted hall, shut the door softly behind
him, and stood there fixed in wonder.  No surprise of
strangeness could equal the surprise of that complete
familiarity.  There was the bust of Chalmers near the stair-
railings, there was the clothes-brush in the accustomed
place; and there, on the hat-stand, hung hats and coats that
must surely be the same as he remembered.  Ten years dropped
from his life, as a pin may slip between the fingers; and the
ocean and the mountains, and the mines, and crowded marts and
mingled races of San Francisco, and his own fortune and his
own disgrace, became, for that one moment, the figures of a
dream that was over.

He took off his hat, and moved mechanically toward the stand;
and there he found a small change that was a great one to
him.  The pin that had been his from boyhood, where he had
flung his balmoral when he loitered home from the Academy,
and his first hat when he came briskly back from college or
the office - his pin was occupied.  'They might have at least
respected my pin!' he thought, and he was moved as by a
slight, and began at once to recollect that he was here an
interloper, in a strange house, which he had entered almost
by a burglary, and where at any moment he might be
scandalously challenged.

He moved at once, his hat still in his hand, to the door of
his father's room, opened it, and entered.  Mr. Nicholson sat
in the same place and posture as on that last Sunday morning;
only he was older, and greyer, and sterner; and as he now
glanced up and caught the eye of his son, a strange commotion
and a dark flush sprung into his face.

'Father,' said John, steadily, and even cheerfully, for this
was a moment against which he was long ago prepared, 'father,
here I am, and here is the money that I took from you.  I
have come back to ask your forgiveness, and to stay Christmas
with you and the children.'

'Keep your money,' said the father, 'and go!'

'Father!' cried John; 'for God's sake don't receive me this
way.  I've come for - '

'Understand me,' interrupted Mr. Nicholson; 'you are no son
of mine; and in the sight of God, I wash my hands of you.
One last thing I will tell you; one warning I will give you;
all is discovered, and you are being hunted for your crimes;
if you are still at large it is thanks to me; but I have done
all that I mean to do; and from this time forth I would not
raise one finger - not one finger - to save you from the
gallows!  And now,' with a low voice of absolute authority,
and a single weighty gesture of the finger, 'and now - go!'



CHAPTER VI - THE HOUSE AT MURRAYFIELD



How John passed the evening, in what windy confusion of mind,
in what squalls of anger and lulls of sick collapse, in what
pacing of streets and plunging into public-houses, it would
profit little to relate.  His misery, if it were not
progressive, yet tended in no way to diminish; for in
proportion as grief and indignation abated, fear began to
take their place.  At first, his father's menacing words lay
by in some safe drawer of memory, biding their hour.  At
first, John was all thwarted affection and blighted hope;
next bludgeoned vanity raised its head again, with twenty
mortal gashes: and the father was disowned even as he had
disowned the son.  What was this regular course of life, that
John should have admired it? what were these clock-work
virtues, from which love was absent?  Kindness was the test,
kindness the aim and soul; and judged by such a standard, the
discarded prodigal - now rapidly drowning his sorrows and his
reason in successive drams - was a creature of a lovelier
morality than his self-righteous father.  Yes, he was the
better man; he felt it, glowed with the consciousness, and
entering a public-house at the corner of Howard Place
(whither he had somehow wandered) he pledged his own virtues
in a glass - perhaps the fourth since his dismissal.  Of that
he knew nothing, keeping no account of what he did or where
he went; and in the general crashing hurry of his nerves,
unconscious of the approach of intoxication.  Indeed, it is a
question whether he were really growing intoxicated, or
whether at first the spirits did not even sober him.  For it
was even as he drained this last glass that his father's
ambiguous and menacing words - popping from their hiding-
place in memory - startled him like a hand laid upon his
shoulder.  'Crimes, hunted, the gallows.'  They were ugly
words; in the ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the
uglier; for if some judicial error were in act against him,
who should set a limit to its grossness or to how far it
might be pushed?  Not John, indeed; he was no believer in the
powers of innocence, his cursed experience pointing in quite
other ways; and his fears, once wakened, grew with every hour
and hunted him about the city streets.

It was, perhaps, nearly nine at night; he had eaten nothing
since lunch, he had drunk a good deal, and he was exhausted
by emotion, when the thought of Houston came into his head.
He turned, not merely to the man as a friend, but to his
house as a place of refuge.  The danger that threatened him
was still so vague that he knew neither what to fear nor
where he might expect it; but this much at least seemed
undeniable, that a private house was safer than a public inn.
Moved by these counsels, he turned at once to the Caledonian
Station, passed (not without alarm) into the bright lights of
the approach, redeemed his portmanteau from the cloak-room,
and was soon whirling in a cab along the Glasgow Road.  The
change of movement and position, the sight of the lamps
twinkling to the rear, and the smell of damp and mould and
rotten straw which clung about the vehicle, wrought in him
strange alternations of lucidity and mortal giddiness.

'I have been drinking,' he discovered; 'I must go straight to
bed, and sleep.'  And he thanked Heaven for the drowsiness
that came upon his mind in waves.

From one of these spells he was wakened by the stoppage of
the cab; and, getting down, found himself in quite a country
road, the last lamp of the suburb shining some way below, and
the high walls of a garden rising before him in the dark.
The Lodge (as the place was named), stood, indeed, very
solitary.  To the south it adjoined another house, but
standing in so large a garden as to be well out of cry; on
all other sides, open fields stretched upward to the woods of
Corstorphine Hill, or backward to the dells of Ravelston, or
downward toward the valley of the Leith.  The effect of
seclusion was aided by the great height of the garden walls,
which were, indeed, conventual, and, as John had tested in
former days, defied the climbing schoolboy.  The lamp of the
cab threw a gleam upon the door and the not brilliant handle
of the bell.

'Shall I ring for ye?' said the cabman, who had descended
from his perch, and was slapping his chest, for the night was
bitter.

'I wish you would,' said John, putting his hand to his brow
in one of his accesses of giddiness.

The man pulled at the handle, and the clanking of the bell
replied from further in the garden; twice and thrice he did
it, with sufficient intervals; in the great frosty silence of
the night the sounds fell sharp and small.

'Does he expect ye?' asked the driver, with that manner of
familiar interest that well became his port-wine face; and
when John had told him no, 'Well, then,' said the cabman, 'if
ye'll tak' my advice of it, we'll just gang back.  And that's
disinterested, mind ye, for my stables are in the Glesgie
Road.'

'The servants must hear,' said John.

'Hout!' said the driver.  'He keeps no servants here, man.
They're a' in the town house; I drive him often; it's just a
kind of a hermitage, this.'

'Give me the bell,' said John; and he plucked at it like a
man desperate.

The clamour had not yet subsided before they heard steps upon
the gravel, and a voice of singular nervous irritability
cried to them through the door, 'Who are you, and what do you
want?'

'Alan,' said John, 'it's me - it's Fatty - John, you know.
I'm just come home, and I've come to stay with you.'

There was no reply for a moment, and then the door was
opened.

'Get the portmanteau down,' said John to the driver.

'Do nothing of the kind,' said Alan; and then to John, 'Come
in here a moment.  I want to speak to you.'

John entered the garden, and the door was closed behind him.
A candle stood on the gravel walk, winking a little in the
draughts; it threw inconstant sparkles on the clumped holly,
struck the light and darkness to and fro like a veil on
Alan's features, and sent his shadow hovering behind him.
All beyond was inscrutable; and John's dizzy brain rocked
with the shadow.  Yet even so, it struck him that Alan was
pale, and his voice, when he spoke, unnatural.

'What brings you here to-night?' he began.  'I don't want,
God knows, to seem unfriendly; but I cannot take you in,
Nicholson; I cannot do it.'

'Alan,' said John, 'you've just got to!  You don't know the
mess I'm in; the governor's turned me out, and I daren't show
my face in an inn, because they're down on me for murder or
something!'

'For what?' cried Alan, starting.

'Murder, I believe,' says John.

'Murder!' repeated Alan, and passed his hand over his eyes.
'What was that you were saying?' he asked again.

'That they were down on me,' said John.  'I'm accused of
murder, by what I can make out; and I've really had a
dreadful day of it, Alan, and I can't sleep on the roadside
on a night like this - at least, not with a portmanteau,' he
pleaded.

'Hush!' said Alan, with his head on one side; and then, 'Did
you hear nothing?' he asked.

'No,' said John, thrilling, he knew not why, with
communicated terror.  'No, I heard nothing; why?'  And then,
as there was no answer, he reverted to his pleading: 'But I
say, Alan, you've just got to take me in.  I'll go right away
to bed if you have anything to do.  I seem to have been
drinking; I was that knocked over.  I wouldn't turn you away,
Alan, if you were down on your luck.'

'No?' returned Alan.  'Neither will you, then.  Come and
let's get your portmanteau.'

The cabman was paid, and drove off down the long, lamp-
lighted hill, and the two friends stood on the side-walk
beside the portmanteau till the last rumble of the wheels had
died in silence.  It seemed to John as though Alan attached
importance to this departure of the cab; and John, who was in
no state to criticise, shared profoundly in the feeling.

When the stillness was once more perfect, Alan shouldered the
portmanteau, carried it in, and shut and locked the garden
door; and then, once more, abstraction seemed to fall upon
him, and he stood with his hand on the key, until the cold
began to nibble at John's fingers.

'Why are we standing here?' asked John.

'Eh?' said Alan, blankly.

'Why, man, you don't seem yourself,' said the other.

'No, I'm not myself,' said Alan; and he sat down on the
portmanteau and put his face in his hands.

John stood beside him swaying a little, and looking about him
at the swaying shadows, the flitting sparkles, and the steady
stars overhead, until the windless cold began to touch him
through his clothes on the bare skin.  Even in his bemused
intelligence, wonder began to awake.

'I say, let's come on to the house,' he said at last.

'Yes, let's come on to the house,' repeated Alan.

And he rose at once, reshouldered the portmanteau, and taking
the candle in his other hand, moved forward to the Lodge.
This was a long, low building, smothered in creepers; and
now, except for some chinks of light between the dining-room
shutters, it was plunged in darkness and silence.

In the hall Alan lighted another candle, gave it to John, and
opened the door of a bedroom.

'Here,' said he; 'go to bed.  Don't mind me, John.  You'll be
sorry for me when you know.'

'Wait a bit,' returned John; 'I've got so cold with all that
standing about.  Let's go into the dining-room a minute.
Just one glass to warm me, Alan.'

On the table in the hall stood a glass, and a bottle with a
whisky label on a tray.  It was plain the bottle had been
just opened, for the cork and corkscrew lay beside it.

'Take that,' said Alan, passing John the whisky, and then
with a certain roughness pushed his friend into the bedroom,
and closed the door behind him.

John stood amazed; then he shook the bottle, and, to his
further wonder, found it partly empty.  Three or four glasses
were gone.  Alan must have uncorked a bottle of whisky and
drank three or four glasses one after the other, without
sitting down, for there was no chair, and that in his own
cold lobby on this freezing night!  It fully explained his
eccentricities, John reflected sagely, as he mixed himself a
grog.  Poor Alan!  He was drunk; and what a dreadful thing
was drink, and what a slave to it poor Alan was, to drink in
this unsociable, uncomfortable fashion!  The man who would
drink alone, except for health's sake - as John was now doing
- was a man utterly lost.  He took the grog out, and felt
hazier, but warmer.  It was hard work opening the portmanteau
and finding his night things; and before he was undressed,
the cold had struck home to him once more.  'Well,' said he;
'just a drop more.  There's no sense in getting ill with all
this other trouble.'  And presently dreamless slumber buried
him.

When John awoke it was day.  The low winter sun was already
in the heavens, but his watch had stopped, and it was
impossible to tell the hour exactly.  Ten, he guessed it, and
made haste to dress, dismal reflections crowding on his mind.
But it was less from terror than from regret that he now
suffered; and with his regret there were mingled cutting
pangs of penitence.  There had fallen upon him a blow, cruel,
indeed, but yet only the punishment of old misdoing; and he
had rebelled and plunged into fresh sin.  The rod had been
used to chasten, and he had bit the chastening fingers.  His
father was right; John had justified him; John was no guest
for decent people's houses, and no fit associate for decent
people's children.  And had a broader hint been needed, there
was the case of his old friend.  John was no drunkard, though
he could at times exceed; and the picture of Houston drinking
neat spirits at his hall-table struck him with something like
disgust.  He hung back from meeting his old friend.  He could
have wished he had not come to him; and yet, even now, where
else was he to turn?

These musings occupied him while he dressed, and accompanied
him into the lobby of the house.  The door stood open on the
garden; doubtless, Alan had stepped forth; and John did as he
supposed his friend had done.  The ground was hard as iron,
the frost still rigorous; as he brushed among the hollies,
icicles jingled and glittered in their fall; and wherever he
went, a volley of eager sparrows followed him.  Here were
Christmas weather and Christmas morning duly met, to the
delight of children.  This was the day of reunited families,
the day to which he had so long looked forward, thinking to
awake in his own bed in Randolph Crescent, reconciled with
all men and repeating the footprints of his youth; and here
he was alone, pacing the alleys of a wintry garden and filled
with penitential thoughts.

And that reminded him: why was he alone? and where was Alan?
The thought of the festal morning and the due salutations
reawakened his desire for his friend, and he began to call
for him by name.  As the sound of his voice died away, he was
aware of the greatness of the silence that environed him.
But for the twittering of the sparrows and the crunching of
his own feet upon the frozen snow, the whole windless world
of air hung over him entranced, and the stillness weighed
upon his mind with a horror of solitude.

Still calling at intervals, but now with a moderated voice,
he made the hasty circuit of the garden, and finding neither
man nor trace of man in all its evergreen coverts, turned at
last to the house.  About the house the silence seemed to
deepen strangely.  The door, indeed, stood open as before;
but the windows were still shuttered, the chimneys breathed
no stain into the bright air, there sounded abroad none of
that low stir (perhaps audible rather to the ear of the
spirit than to the ear of the flesh) by which a house
announces and betrays its human lodgers.  And yet Alan must
be there - Alan locked in drunken slumbers, forgetful of the
return of day, of the holy season, and of the friend whom he
had so coldly received and was now so churlishly neglecting.
John's disgust redoubled at the thought, but hunger was
beginning to grow stronger than repulsion, and as a step to
breakfast, if nothing else, he must find and arouse this
sleeper.

He made the circuit of the bedroom quarters.  All, until he
came to Alan's chamber, were locked from without, and bore
the marks of a prolonged disuse.  But Alan's was a room in
commission, filled with clothes, knickknacks, letters, books,
and the conveniences of a solitary man.  The fire had been
lighted; but it had long ago burned out, and the ashes were
stone cold.  The bed had been made, but it had not been slept
in.

Worse and worse, then; Alan must have fallen where he sat,
and now sprawled brutishly, no doubt, upon the dining-room
floor.

The dining-room was a very long apartment, and was reached
through a passage; so that John, upon his entrance, brought
but little light with him, and must move toward the windows
with spread arms, groping and knocking on the furniture.
Suddenly he tripped and fell his length over a prostrate
body.  It was what he had looked for, yet it shocked him; and
he marvelled that so rough an impact should not have kicked a
groan out of the drunkard.  Men had killed themselves ere now
in such excesses, a dreary and degraded end that made John
shudder.  What if Alan were dead?  There would be a
Christmas-day!

By this, John had his hand upon the shutters, and flinging
them back, beheld once again the blessed face of the day.
Even by that light the room had a discomfortable air.  The
chairs were scattered, and one had been overthrown; the
table-cloth, laid as if for dinner, was twitched upon one
side, and some of the dishes had fallen to the floor.  Behind
the table lay the drunkard, still unaroused, only one foot
visible to John.

But now that light was in the room, the worst seemed over; it
was a disgusting business, but not more than disgusting; and
it was with no great apprehension that John proceeded to make
the circuit of the table: his last comparatively tranquil
moment for that day.  No sooner had he turned the corner, no
sooner had his eyes alighted on the body, than he gave a
smothered, breathless cry, and fled out of the room and out
of the house.

It was not Alan who lay there, but a man well up in years, of
stern countenance and iron-grey locks; and it was no
drunkard, for the body lay in a black pool of blood, and the
open eyes stared upon the ceiling.

To and fro walked John before the door.  The extreme
sharpness of the air acted on his nerves like an astringent,
and braced them swiftly.  Presently, he not relaxing in his
disordered walk, the images began to come clearer and stay
longer in his fancy; and next the power of thought came back
to him, and the horror and danger of his situation rooted him
to the ground.

He grasped his forehead, and staring on one spot of gravel,
pieced together what he knew and what he suspected.  Alan had
murdered some one: possibly 'that man' against whom the
butler chained the door in Regent Terrace; possibly another;
some one at least: a human soul, whom it was death to slay
and whose blood lay spilled upon the floor.  This was the
reason of the whisky drinking in the passage, of his
unwillingness to welcome John, of his strange behaviour and
bewildered words; this was why he had started at and harped
upon the name of murder; this was why he had stood and
hearkened, or sat and covered his eyes, in the black night.
And now he was gone, now he had basely fled; and to all his
perplexities and dangers John stood heir.

'Let me think - let me think,' he said, aloud, impatiently,
even pleadingly, as if to some merciless interrupter.  In the
turmoil of his wits, a thousand hints and hopes and threats
and terrors dinning continuously in his ears, he was like one
plunged in the hubbub of a crowd.  How was he to remember -
he, who had not a thought to spare - that he was himself the
author, as well as the theatre, of so much confusion?  But in
hours of trial the junto of man's nature is dissolved, and
anarchy succeeds.

It was plain he must stay no longer where he was, for here
was a new Judicial Error in the very making.  It was not so
plain where he must go, for the old Judicial Error, vague as
a cloud, appeared to fill the habitable world; whatever it
might be, it watched for him, full-grown, in Edinburgh; it
must have had its birth in San Francisco; it stood guard, no
doubt, like a dragon, at the bank where he should cash his
credit; and though there were doubtless many other places,
who should say in which of them it was not ambushed?  No, he
could not tell where he was to go; he must not lose time on
these insolubilities.  Let him go back to the beginning.  It
was plain he must stay no longer where he was.  It was plain,
too, that he must not flee as he was, for he could not carry
his portmanteau, and to flee and leave it was to plunge
deeper in the mire.  He must go, leave the house unguarded,
find a cab, and return - return after an absence?  Had he
courage for that?

And just then he spied a stain about a hand's-breadth on his
trouser-leg, and reached his finger down to touch it.  The
finger was stained red: it was blood; he stared upon it with
disgust, and awe, and terror, and in the sharpness of the new
sensation, fell instantly to act.

He cleansed his finger in the snow, returned into the house,
drew near with hushed footsteps to the dining-room door, and
shut and locked it.  Then he breathed a little freer, for
here at least was an oaken barrier between himself and what
he feared.  Next, he hastened to his room, tore off the
spotted trousers which seemed in his eyes a link to bind him
to the gallows, flung them in a corner, donned another pair,
breathlessly crammed his night things into his portmanteau,
locked it, swung it with an effort from the ground, and with
a rush of relief, came forth again under the open heavens.

The portmanteau, being of occidental build, was no feather-
weight; it had distressed the powerful Alan; and as for John,
he was crushed under its bulk, and the sweat broke upon him
thickly.  Twice he must set it down to rest before he reached
the gate; and when he had come so far, he must do as Alan
did, and take his seat upon one corner.  Here then, he sat a
while and panted; but now his thoughts were sensibly
lightened; now, with the trunk standing just inside the door,
some part of his dissociation from the house of crime had
been effected, and the cabman need not pass the garden wall.
It was wonderful how that relieved him; for the house, in his
eyes, was a place to strike the most cursory beholder with
suspicion, as though the very windows had cried murder.

But there was to be no remission of the strokes of fate.  As
he thus sat, taking breath in the shadow of the wall and
hopped about by sparrows, it chanced that his eye roved to
the fastening of the door; and what he saw plucked him to his
feet.  The thing locked with a spring; once the door was
closed, the bolt shut of itself; and without a key, there was
no means of entering from without.

He saw himself obliged to one of two distasteful and perilous
alternatives; either to shut the door altogether and set his
portmanteau out upon the wayside, a wonder to all beholders;
or to leave the door ajar, so that any thievish tramp or
holiday schoolboy might stray in and stumble on the grisly
secret.  To the last, as the least desperate, his mind
inclined; but he must first insure himself that he was
unobserved.  He peered out, and down the long road; it lay
dead empty.  He went to the corner of the by-road that comes
by way of Dean; there also not a passenger was stirring.
Plainly it was, now or never, the high tide of his affairs;
and he drew the door as close as he durst, slipped a pebble
in the chink, and made off downhill to find a cab.

Half-way down a gate opened, and a troop of Christmas
children sallied forth in the most cheerful humour, followed
more soberly by a smiling mother.

'And this is Christmas-day!' thought John; and could have
laughed aloud in tragic bitterness of heart.



CHAPTER VII - A TRAGI-COMEDY IN A CAB



In front of Donaldson's Hospital, John counted it good
fortune to perceive a cab a great way of, and by much
shouting and waving of his arm, to catch the notice of the
driver.  He counted it good fortune, for the time was long to
him till he should have done for ever with the Lodge; and the
further he must go to find a cab, the greater the chance that
the inevitable discovery had taken place, and that he should
return to find the garden full of angry neighbours.  Yet when
the vehicle drew up he was sensibly chagrined to recognise
the port-wine cabman of the night before.  'Here,' he could
not but reflect, 'here is another link in the Judicial
Error.'

The driver, on the other hand, was pleased to drop again upon
so liberal a fare; and as he was a man - the reader must
already have perceived - of easy, not to say familiar,
manners, he dropped at once into a vein of friendly talk,
commenting on the weather, on the sacred season, which struck
him chiefly in the light of a day of liberal gratuities, on
the chance which had reunited him to a pleasing customer, and
on the fact that John had been (as he was pleased to call it)
visibly 'on the randan' the night before.

'And ye look dreidful bad the-day, sir, I must say that,' he
continued.  'There's nothing like a dram for ye - if ye'll
take my advice of it; and bein' as it's Christmas, I'm no'
saying,' he added, with a fatherly smile, 'but what I would
join ye mysel'.'

John had listened with a sick heart.

'I'll give you a dram when we've got through,' said he,
affecting a sprightliness which sat on him most unhandsomely,
'and not a drop till then.  Business first, and pleasure
afterward.'

With this promise the jarvey was prevailed upon to clamber to
his place and drive, with hideous deliberation, to the door
of the Lodge.  There were no signs as yet of any public
emotion; only, two men stood not far off in talk, and their
presence, seen from afar, set John's pulses buzzing.  He
might have spared himself his fright, for the pair were lost
in some dispute of a theological complexion, and with
lengthened upper lip and enumerating fingers, pursued the
matter of their difference, and paid no heed to John.

But the cabman proved a thorn in the flesh.

Nothing would keep him on his perch; he must clamber down,
comment upon the pebble in the door (which he regarded as an
ingenious but unsafe device), help John with the portmanteau,
and enliven matters with a flow of speech, and especially of
questions, which I thus condense:-

'He'll no' be here himsel', will he?  No?  Well, he's an
eccentric man - a fair oddity - if ye ken the expression.
Great trouble with his tenants, they tell me.  I've driven
the fam'ly for years.  I drove a cab at his father's waddin'.
What'll your name be? - I should ken your face.  Baigrey, ye
say?  There were Baigreys about Gilmerton; ye'll be one of
that lot?  Then this'll be a friend's portmantie, like?  Why?
Because the name upon it's Nucholson!  Oh, if ye're in a
hurry, that's another job.  Waverley Brig?  Are ye for away?'

So the friendly toper prated and questioned and kept John's
heart in a flutter.  But to this also, as to other evils
under the sun, there came a period; and the victim of
circumstances began at last to rumble toward the railway
terminus at Waverley Bridge.  During the transit, he sat with
raised glasses in the frosty chill and mouldy fetor of his
chariot, and glanced out sidelong on the holiday face of
things, the shuttered shops, and the crowds along the
pavement, much as the rider in the Tyburn cart may have
observed the concourse gathering to his execution.

At the station his spirits rose again; another stage of his
escape was fortunately ended - he began to spy blue water.
He called a railway porter, and bade him carry the
portmanteau to the cloak-room: not that he had any notion of
delay; flight, instant flight was his design, no matter
whither; but he had determined to dismiss the cabman ere he
named, or even chose, his destination, thus possibly balking
the Judicial Error of another link.  This was his cunning
aim, and now with one foot on the roadway, and one still on
the coach-step, he made haste to put the thing in practice,
and plunged his hand into his trousers pocket.

There was nothing there!

Oh yes; this time he was to blame.  He should have
remembered, and when he deserted his blood-stained
pantaloons, he should not have deserted along with them his
purse.  Make the most of his error, and then compare it with
the punishment!  Conceive his new position, for I lack words
to picture it; conceive him condemned to return to that
house, from the very thought of which his soul revolted, and
once more to expose himself to capture on the very scene of
the misdeed: conceive him linked to the mouldy cab and the
familiar cabman.  John cursed the cabman silently, and then
it occurred to him that he must stop the incarceration of his
portmanteau; that, at least, he must keep close at hand, and
he turned to recall the porter.  But his reflections, brief
as they had appeared, must have occupied him longer than he
supposed, and there was the man already returning with the
receipt.

Well, that was settled; he had lost his portmanteau also; for
the sixpence with which he had paid the Murrayfield Toll was
one that had strayed alone into his waistcoat pocket, and
unless he once more successfully achieved the adventure of
the house of crime, his portmanteau lay in the cloakroom in
eternal pawn, for lack of a penny fee.  And then he
remembered the porter, who stood suggestively attentive,
words of gratitude hanging on his lips.

John hunted right and left; he found a coin - prayed God that
it was a sovereign -  drew it out, beheld a halfpenny, and
offered it to the porter.

The man's jaw dropped.

'It's only a halfpenny!' he said, startled out of railway
decency.

'I know that,' said John, piteously.

And here the porter recovered the dignity of man.

'Thank you, sir,' said he, and would have returned the base
gratuity.  But John, too, would none of it; and as they
struggled, who must join in but the cabman?

'Hoots, Mr. Baigrey,' said he, 'you surely forget what day it
is!'

'I tell you I have no change!' cried John.

'Well,' said the driver, 'and what then?  I would rather give
a man a shillin' on a day like this than put him off with a
derision like a bawbee.  I'm surprised at the like of you,
Mr. Baigrey!'

'My name is not Baigrey!' broke out John, in mere childish
temper and distress.

'Ye told me it was yoursel',' said the cabman.

'I know I did; and what the devil right had you to ask?'
cried the unhappy one.

'Oh, very well,' said the driver.  'I know my place, if you
know yours - if you know yours!' he repeated, as one who
should imply grave doubt; and muttered inarticulate thunders,
in which the grand old name of gentleman was taken seemingly
in vain.

Oh to have been able to discharge this monster, whom John now
perceived, with tardy clear-sightedness, to have begun
betimes the festivities of Christmas!  But far from any such
ray of consolation visiting the lost, he stood bare of help
and helpers, his portmanteau sequestered in one place, his
money deserted in another and guarded by a corpse; himself,
so sedulous of privacy, the cynosure of all men's eyes about
the station; and, as if these were not enough mischances, he
was now fallen in ill-blood with the beast to whom his
poverty had linked him!  In ill-blood, as he reflected
dismally, with the witness who perhaps might hang or save
him!  There was no time to be lost; he durst not linger any
longer in that public spot; and whether he had recourse to
dignity or conciliation, the remedy must be applied at once.
Some happily surviving element of manhood moved him to the
former.

'Let us have no more of this,' said he, his foot once more
upon the step.  'Go back to where we came from.'

He had avoided the name of any destination, for there was now
quite a little band of railway folk about the cab, and he
still kept an eye upon the court of justice, and laboured to
avoid concentric evidence.  But here again the fatal jarvey
out-manoeuvred him.

'Back to the Ludge?' cried he, in shrill tones of protest.

'Drive on at once!' roared John, and slammed the door behind
him, so that the crazy chariot rocked and jingled.

Forth trundled the cab into the Christmas streets, the fare
within plunged in the blackness of a despair that neighboured
on unconsciousness, the driver on the box digesting his
rebuke and his customer's duplicity.  I would not be thought
to put the pair in competition; John's case was out of all
parallel.  But the cabman, too, is worth the sympathy of the
judicious; for he was a fellow of genuine kindliness and a
high sense of personal dignity incensed by drink; and his
advances had been cruelly and publicly rebuffed.  As he
drove, therefore, he counted his wrongs, and thirsted for
sympathy and drink.  Now, it chanced he had a friend, a
publican in Queensferry Street, from whom, in view of the
sacredness of the occasion, he thought he might extract a
dram.  Queensferry Street lies something off the direct road
to Murrayfield.  But then there is the hilly cross-road that
passes by the valley of the Leith and the Dean Cemetery; and
Queensferry Street is on the way to that.  What was to hinder
the cabman, since his horse was dumb, from choosing the
cross-road, and calling on his friend in passing?  So it was
decided; and the charioteer, already somewhat mollified,
turned aside his horse to the right.

John, meanwhile, sat collapsed, his chin sunk upon his chest,
his mind in abeyance.  The smell of the cab was still faintly
present to his senses, and a certain leaden chill about his
feet, all else had disappeared in one vast oppression of
calamity and physical faintness.  It was drawing on to noon -
two-and-twenty hours since he had broken bread; in the
interval, he had suffered tortures of sorrow and alarm, and
been partly tipsy; and though it was impossible to say he
slept, yet when the cab stopped and the cabman thrust his
head into the window, his attention had to be recalled from
depths of vacancy.

'If you'll no' STAND me a dram,' said the driver, with a
well-merited severity of tone and manner, 'I dare say ye'll
have no objection to my taking one mysel'?'

'Yes - no - do what you like,' returned John; and then, as he
watched his tormentor mount the stairs and enter the whisky-
shop, there floated into his mind a sense as of something
long ago familiar.  At that he started fully awake, and
stared at the shop-fronts.  Yes, he knew them; but when? and
how?  Long since, he thought; and then, casting his eye
through the front glass, which had been recently occluded by
the figure of the jarvey, he beheld the tree-tops of the
rookery in Randolph Crescent.  He was close to home - home,
where he had thought, at that hour, to be sitting in the
well-remembered drawing-room in friendly converse; and,
instead - !

It was his first impulse to drop into the bottom of the cab;
his next, to cover his face with his hands.  So he sat, while
the cabman toasted the publican, and the publican toasted the
cabman, and both reviewed the affairs of the nation; so he
still sat, when his master condescended to return, and drive
off at last down-hill, along the curve of Lynedoch Place; but
even so sitting, as he passed the end of his father's street,
he took one glance from between shielding fingers, and beheld
a doctor's carriage at the door.

'Well, just so,' thought he; 'I'll have killed my father!
And this is Christmas-day!'

If Mr. Nicholson died, it was down this same road he must
journey to the grave; and down this road, on the same errand,
his wife had preceded him years before; and many other
leading citizens, with the proper trappings and attendance of
the end.  And now, in that frosty, ill-smelling, straw-
carpeted, and ragged-cushioned cab, with his breath
congealing on the glasses, where else was John himself
advancing to?

The thought stirred his imagination, which began to
manufacture many thousand pictures, bright and fleeting, like
the shapes in a kaleidoscope; and now he saw himself, ruddy
and comfortered, sliding in the gutter; and, again, a little
woe-begone, bored urchin tricked forth in crape and weepers,
descending this same hill at the foot's pace of mourning
coaches, his mother's body just preceding him; and yet again,
his fancy, running far in front, showed him his destination -
now standing solitary in the low sunshine, with the sparrows
hopping on the threshold and the dead man within staring at
the roof - and now, with a sudden change, thronged about with
white-faced, hand-uplifting neighbours, and doctor bursting
through their midst and fixing his stethoscope as he went,
the policeman shaking a sagacious head beside the body.  It
was to this he feared that he was driving; in the midst of
this he saw himself arrive, heard himself stammer faint
explanations, and felt the hand of the constable upon his
shoulder.  Heavens! how he wished he had played the manlier
part; how he despised himself that he had fled that fatal
neighbourhood when all was quiet, and should now be tamely
travelling back when it was thronging with avengers!

Any strong degree of passion lends, even to the dullest, the
forces of the imagination.  And so now as he dwelt on what
was probably awaiting him at the end of this distressful
drive - John, who saw things little, remembered them less,
and could not have described them at all, beheld in his
mind's-eye the garden of the Lodge, detailed as in a map; he
went to and fro in it, feeding his terrors; he saw the
hollies, the snowy borders, the paths where he had sought
Alan, the high, conventual walls, the shut door - what! was
the door shut?  Ay, truly, he had shut it - shut in his
money, his escape, his future life - shut it with these
hands, and none could now open it!  He heard the snap of the
spring-lock like something bursting in his brain, and sat
astonied.

And then he woke again, terror jarring through his vitals.
This was no time to be idle; he must be up and doing, he must
think.  Once at the end of this ridiculous cruise, once at
the Lodge door, there would be nothing for it but to turn the
cab and trundle back again.  Why, then, go so far? why add
another feature of suspicion to a case already so suggestive?
why not turn at once?  It was easy to say, turn; but whither?
He had nowhere now to go to; he could never - he saw it in
letters of blood - he could never pay that cab; he was
saddled with that cab for ever.  Oh that cab! his soul
yearned and burned, and his bowels sounded to be rid of it.
He forgot all other cares.  He must first quit himself of
this ill-smelling vehicle and of the human beast that guided
it - first do that; do that, at least; do that at once.

And just then the cab suddenly stopped, and there was his
persecutor rapping on the front glass.  John let it down, and
beheld the port-wine countenance inflamed with intellectual
triumph.

'I ken wha ye are!' cried the husky voice.  'I mind ye now.
Ye're a Nucholson.  I drove ye to Hermiston to a Christmas
party, and ye came back on the box, and I let ye drive.'

It is a fact.  John knew the man; they had been even friends.
His enemy, he now remembered, was a fellow of great good
nature - endless good nature - with a boy; why not with a
man?  Why not appeal to his better side?  He grasped at the
new hope.

'Great Scott! and so you did,' he cried, as if in a transport
of delight, his voice sounding false in his own ears.  'Well,
if that's so, I've something to say to you.  I'll just get
out, I guess.  Where are we, any way?'

The driver had fluttered his ticket in the eyes of the
branch-toll keeper, and they were now brought to on the
highest and most solitary part of the by-road.  On the left,
a row of fieldside trees beshaded it; on the right, it was
bordered by naked fallows, undulating down-hill to the
Queensferry Road; in front, Corstorphine Hill raised its
snow-bedabbled, darkling woods against the sky.  John looked
all about him, drinking the clear air like wine; then his
eyes returned to the cabman's face as he sat, not
ungleefully, awaiting John's communication, with the air of
one looking to be tipped.

The features of that face were hard to read, drink had so
swollen them, drink had so painted them, in tints that varied
from brick-red to mulberry.  The small grey eyes blinked, the
lips moved, with greed; greed was the ruling passion; and
though there was some good nature, some genuine kindliness, a
true human touch, in the old toper, his greed was now so set
afire by hope, that all other traits of character lay
dormant.  He sat there a monument of gluttonous desire.

John's heart slowly fell.  He had opened his lips, but he
stood there and uttered nought.  He sounded the well of his
courage, and it was dry.  He groped in his treasury of words,
and it was vacant.  A devil of dumbness had him by the
throat; the devil of terror babbled in his ears; and
suddenly, without a word uttered, with no conscious purpose
formed in his will, John whipped about, tumbled over the
roadside wall, and began running for his life across the
fallows.

He had not gone far, he was not past the midst of the first
afield, when his whole brain thundered within him, 'Fool!
You have your watch!'  The shock stopped him, and he faced
once more toward the cab.  The driver was leaning over the
wall, brandishing his whip, his face empurpled, roaring like
a bull.  And John saw (or thought) that he had lost the
chance.  No watch would pacify the man's resentment now; he
would cry for vengeance also.  John would be had under the
eye of the police; his tale would be unfolded, his secret
plumbed, his destiny would close on him at last, and for
ever.

He uttered a deep sigh; and just as the cabman, taking heart
of grace, was beginning at last to scale the wall, his
defaulting customer fell again to running, and disappeared
into the further fields.




CHAPTER VIII - SINGULAR INSTANCE OF THE UTILITY OF PASS-KEYS



WHERE he ran at first, John never very clearly knew; nor yet
how long a time elapsed ere he found himself in the by-road
near the lodge of Ravelston, propped against the wall, his
lungs heaving like bellows, his legs leaden-heavy, his mind
possessed by one sole desire - to lie down and be unseen.  He
remembered the thick coverts round the quarry-hole pond, an
untrodden corner of the world where he might surely find
concealment till the night should fall.  Thither he passed
down the lane; and when he came there, behold! he had
forgotten the frost, and the pond was alive with young people
skating, and the pond-side coverts were thick with lookers-
on.  He looked on a while himself.  There was one tall,
graceful maiden, skating hand in hand with a youth, on whom
she bestowed her bright eyes perhaps too patently; and it was
strange with what anger John beheld her.  He could have
broken forth in curses; he could have stood there, like a
mortified tramp, and shaken his fist and vented his gall upon
her by the hour - or so he thought; and the next moment his
heart bled for the girl.  'Poor creature, it's little she
knows!' he sighed.  'Let her enjoy herself while she can!'
But was it possible, when Flora used to smile at him on the
Braid ponds, she could have looked so fulsome to a sick-
hearted bystander?

The thought of one quarry, in his frozen wits, suggested
another; and he plodded off toward Craigleith.  A wind had
sprung up out of the north-west; it was cruel keen, it dried
him like a fire, and racked his finger-joints.  It brought
clouds, too; pale, swift, hurrying clouds, that blotted
heaven and shed gloom upon the earth.  He scrambled up among
the hazelled rubbish heaps that surround the caldron of the
quarry, and lay flat upon the stones.  The wind searched
close along the earth, the stones were cutting and icy, the
bare hazels wailed about him; and soon the air of the
afternoon began to be vocal with those strange and dismal
harpings that herald snow.  Pain and misery turned in John's
limbs to a harrowing impatience and blind desire of change;
now he would roll in his harsh lair, and when the flints
abraded him, was almost pleased; now he would crawl to the
edge of the huge pit and look dizzily down.  He saw the
spiral of the descending roadway, the steep crags, the
clinging bushes, the peppering of snow-wreaths, and far down
in the bottom, the diminished crane.  Here, no doubt, was a
way to end it.  But it somehow did not take his fancy.

And suddenly he was aware that he was hungry; ay, even
through the tortures of the cold, even through the frosts of
despair, a gross, desperate longing after food, no matter
what, no matter how, began to wake and spur him.  Suppose he
pawned his watch?  But no, on Christmas-day - this was
Christmas-day! - the pawnshop would be closed.  Suppose he
went to the public-house close by at Blackhall, and offered
the watch, which was worth ten pounds, in payment for a meal
of bread and cheese?  The incongruity was too remarkable; the
good folks would either put him to the door, or only let him
in to send for the police.  He turned his pockets out one
after another; some San Francisco tram-car checks, one cigar,
no lights, the pass-key to his father's house, a pocket-
handkerchief, with just a touch of scent: no, money could be
raised on none of these.  There was nothing for it but to
starve; and after all, what mattered it?  That also was a
door of exit.

He crept close among the bushes, the wind playing round him
like a lash; his clothes seemed thin as paper, his joints
burned, his skin curdled on his bones.  He had a vision of a
high-lying cattle-drive in California, and the bed of a dried
stream with one muddy pool, by which the vaqueros had
encamped: splendid sun over all, the big bonfire blazing, the
strips of cow browning and smoking on a skewer of wood; how
warm it was, how savoury the steam of scorching meat!  And
then again he remembered his manifold calamities, and
burrowed and wallowed in the sense of his disgrace and shame.
And next he was entering Frank's restaurant in Montgomery
Street, San Francisco; he had ordered a pan-stew and venison
chops, of which he was immoderately fond, and as he sat
waiting, Munroe, the good attendant, brought him a whisky
punch; he saw the strawberries float on the delectable cup,
he heard the ice chink about the straws.  And then he woke
again to his detested fate, and found himself sitting, humped
together, in a windy combe of quarry refuse - darkness thick
about him, thin flakes of snow flying here and there like
rags of paper, and the strong shuddering of his body clashing
his teeth like a hiccough.

We have seen John in nothing but the stormiest condition; we
have seen him reckless, desperate, tried beyond his moderate
powers; of his daily self, cheerful, regular, not unthrifty,
we have seen nothing; and it may thus be a surprise to the
reader to learn that he was studiously careful of his health.
This favourite preoccupation now awoke.  If he were to sit
there and die of cold, there would be mighty little gained;
better the police cell and the chances of a jury trial, than
the miserable certainty of death at a dyke-side before the
next winter's dawn, or death a little later in the gas-
lighted wards of an infirmary.

He rose on aching legs, and stumbled here and there among the
rubbish heaps, still circumvented by the yawning crater of
the quarry; or perhaps he only thought so, for the darkness
was already dense, the snow was growing thicker, and he moved
like a blind man, and with a blind man's terrors.  At last he
climbed a fence, thinking to drop into the road, and found
himself staggering, instead, among the iron furrows of a
ploughland, endless, it seemed, as a whole county.  And next
he was in a wood, beating among young trees; and then he was
aware of a house with many lighted windows, Christmas
carriages waiting at the doors, and Christmas drivers (for
Christmas has a double edge) becoming swiftly hooded with
snow.  From this glimpse of human cheerfulness, he fled like
Cain; wandered in the night, unpiloted, careless of whither
he went; fell, and lay, and then rose again and wandered
further; and at last, like a transformation scene, behold him
in the lighted jaws of the city, staring at a lamp which had
already donned the tilted night-cap of the snow.  It came
thickly now, a 'Feeding Storm'; and while he yet stood
blinking at the lamp, his feet were buried.  He remembered
something like it in the past, a street-lamp crowned and
caked upon the windward side with snow, the wind uttering its
mournful hoot, himself looking on, even as now; but the cold
had struck too sharply on his wits, and memory failed him as
to the date and sequel of the reminiscence.