Read Ebook: Harry Muir by Oliphant Mrs Margaret

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Ebook has 769 lines and 46590 words, and 16 pages

"No, no; I cannot go to-night. I don't think I can stay to-night," said the brilliant facile clerk.

The entreaties continued a little longer; the resistance became feebler and more feeble, and at last, stipulating that he was to leave them early, the genius of the counting-house consented.

"Harry, my man, send a message to your wife," said a grave snuffy person, who enjoyed the two hundred pounds a year of which John had boasted, and was cashier to the Messrs. Buchanan.

Harry wavered a moment. "Where is the boy?"

"Perhaps she'll come for you, Harry," suggested the malicious Buchanan.

The poor clerk threw down, angrily, the pen he had taken up, and lifted his hat. In another minute, with quickly recovered gaiety, they went out in a band to the adjacent square where they were to dine.

"There's the makings of a capital man in that lad, and there's the makings of a blackguard," said the grave Mr. Gilchrist, shaking his head ruefully, and taking a pinch of snuff; "it'll be a hard race--which of them will win?"

The dinner in George's-square went off very well, and the young clerk, as he warmed, dazzled the little company; he was only a clerk--they were inclined to patronize him at other times--but now the unmistakeable, undesired, pre-eminence, which these young men yielded to their poor companion, was a noticeable thing. The matter of ambition now, was, who should seem most intimate with--who should most attract the attention of the brilliant clerk.

Cuthbert Charteris was a more completely educated man than any other of the party. The thorough literary training will not ally itself to the commercial, as it seems. None of the young merchants had time for the long discipline and athletic mental exercises of the student. They were all making money before they should have been well emancipated from the school-room--all independent men, when they should have been boys--and the contrast was marked enough. There was a good deal of boisterousness in their enjoyment, and they were enjoying themselves heartily, while Cuthbert, getting very weary, felt himself only preserved from utter impatience of their mirth by the interest with which the stranger inspired him--this poor, clever, facile Harry Muir.

The quick mind of this young man seemed to have attained somehow to the results of education without the training and discipline which form so principal a part of it. He seemed to have been a desultory reader, a devourer of everything which came in his way, and while the Buchanans knew few books beyond the serial literature of the time, Harry threw delicate allusions about him, which it seemed he made only for his own enjoyment, since the arrows flew most innocently over the heads of all the rest. Threads of connection with those great thoughts which form the common country of imaginative minds, ideas radiating out from the centre of these, like the lessening circles in the water--the student Cuthbert heard and understood, and wondered--the Buchanans applauded, and did not understand.

One of them at last proposed to go to the theatre--the rest chimed in eagerly. Cuthbert, anxious to have the evening concluded as soon as possible, and resolving to seek no more of the delectable society of his young cousins except at home, where they were tolerable, remonstrated only to be laughed at and overpowered. The grown-up, mature, educated man resigned himself to their boyish guidance very wearily--and what would their wit do now?

He said he would go home--he took up his hat, and played hesitatingly with his gloves. He was excited with the company, the applause, and a little with the wine, and was permitting himself to parley with the tempter.

"Come along, Muir, it's only for once; let us just have this one night."

"No, no." The noes grew faint; the hesitation increased. He consented again.

And so, louder and more boisterous than before, they again entered the busy streets. John Buchanan was a good deal inclined to be obstreperous. It was all that Cuthbert could manage to keep him within bounds.

They had reached the Trongate, and Cuthbert stopped his young companion a moment to look down the long gleaming line of the crowded street. It had been wet in the morning, and the brilliant light from the shop windows glistened in the wet causeway in long lines, and the shifting groups of passengers went and came, ceaselessly, and the hum and din of the great thoroughfare was softened by the gloom and brightened by the light of traffic that illuminated all.

"What are you looking at? See they're all away across the street. What's the good of glowering down the Trongate? Man, Cuthbert, how slow you are," said John Buchanan, dragging the loiterer on.

There was a crowd on the opposite side which had absorbed the others. Cuthbert and John crossed over.

The accident which attracted the crowd was a very common one--an overtasked horse, wearied with the long day's labour, had stumbled and fallen; and now, the weight of the cart to which it was attached having been removed, was making convulsive plunges in the effort to rise. The carters, and the kindred class who are always to be found ready in such small emergencies, were leaping aside themselves, and pressing back the lookers on, as the poor animal struck out his great weary limbs, endeavouring to raise himself from the ground.

Suddenly there was a shrill cry--"The wean--look at the wean; the brute's fit'll kill the wean."

John Buchanan had pushed his way into the crowd, dragging with him the reluctant Cuthbert--and there indeed, close to the great hoofs of the prostrate animal, stood one of those little pale, careworn, withered children whom one sees only in the streets of great cities, and oftenest only at this unwholesome hour of night. But the acuteness peculiar to the class seemed to have forsaken the very little wrinkled old man of the Trongate. He was standing where the next plunge would inevitably throw him down, with the strange scared look which is not fear, common to children in great peril, upon his small white puckered face. Again the panting horse threw out his hoofs in another convulsive exertion. The child was down.

A shadow shot across the light. There were several cries of women. The child was thrown into somebody's arms uninjured. The horse was on its feet, and a man, indistinctly seen in the midst of the eager crowd, struggled ineffectually to raise himself from the ground, where he had fallen.

"I am hurt a little," said the voice of Harry Muir. "Never mind, it is not much, I dare say. Some of you help me up."

There was a rush to assist him; a burst of eager inquiries.

"I got a blow from the hoof; ah! I can't tell what it is," gasped the young man, over whose face the pallor of deadly sickness was stealing. He could not stand. They carried him--these rough strong men, so gently--with his friends crowding about him, to the nearest surgeon's. Everybody was sympathetic; every one interested. But Harry Muir's head had sunk upon his breast, and the fight had gone from his eyes. He was conscious of nothing but pain.

The accident was a serious one; his leg was broken.

"He sent me hither, stranger as I am, To tell this story." AS YOU LIKE IT.

"CUTHBERT," said Richard Buchanan, "do, like a good fellow, go and tell his wife."

"Do you not see, man, that a stranger would alarm her more? Why make me the messenger? You say she knows you, Dick."

"Ay, she knows him," said the second brother, "but she does not know him for any good. You see, Cuthbert, Dick's always enticing poor Muir away--as he did to-night--and the wife wouldn't flatter him if he went up now."

"I don't care a straw for the wife," said Richard angrily. "It's yon grim sister Martha, and that white-faced monkey of a girl. I say, Cuthbert--you needn't go in, and they don't know you--do go before and tell them he's coming. I'll come up with him myself in the noddy--just to oblige me, Cuthbert, will you go?"

"He lives in Port Dundas-road, it's not very far. John will show you where it is," urged Alick.

Cuthbert consented to go; and the obstreperous John was very much subdued, and very ready to accompany his cousin to poor Muir's house. It was now nearly ten o'clock. The young men were all greatly concerned, and in an inner room poor Harry was getting his leg examined, and looking so deadly sick and pale as to alarm both surgeon and friends. It was his temperament, so finely organized, as to feel either pain or pleasure far more exquisitely than is the common lot.

"What will you say to them? Man, Cuthbert, are you not feared?" asked John.

"Why should I be feared? I am very sorry for her, poor woman--but is she such a fury, this wife?"

"It's not the wife, it's his eldest sister. Dick went home with Muir one night when he was'nt quite able to take care of himself, and I can tell you Dick was feared."

"Dick was to blame--I do not feel that I am," said Charteris; "but why was he afraid?--did she say so much to him?"

"She did'nt say anything to him; but you know they say she's awful passionate, and she's a great deal older than Harry; and she's just been like his mother. They're always so strict, these old maids--and Miss Muir's an old maid."

"Wait, then, till I see, John," said Cuthbert; "don't try to intimidate me."

"Yonder's the house," said John.

They had just passed a great quarry, across which the dome of some large building loomed dark against the sky. Then there was a field raised high above the road, with green grass waving over the copestone of a high wall, and at the end of the field stood a solitary house. A house of some pretension, for it boasted its street-door, and was "self-contained;" and albeit the ground-floor on either side was occupied by two not very ambitious shops, the upper flat looked substantial and respectable, although decayed.

They were on the opposite side--the street was very quiet, and their steps and voices echoed through it, so clearly that the loud John sank into whispering and felt himself guilty. The light of a very pale moon was shining into one of the windows. Looking up, Cuthbert saw some one watching them--eagerly pressing against the dark dull panes; as they crossed the street, the face suddenly disappeared.

"That's one of them," whispered John. "Isn't it awful that a poor fellow can't be out a little late, but these women are watching for him that way?"

Cuthbert did not answer. He was thinking of "these women," and of their watching, rather than of the poor fellow who was the object of it.

They had not time to knock, when the door was opened wide to them, and a pale girl's face looked out eagerly. She shrank back at once with a look of blank disappointment which touched Cuthbert's heart, "I--I beg your pardon--I thought it was my brother."

"Your brother will be here very soon. He has done a very brave thing to-night, and has had a slight accident in consequence. I beg you will not be alarmed," said Cuthbert hastily.

"Oh! come in, sir, come in," said the young sister. "A very brave thing." She repeated it again and again, under her breath.

"There's the noddy," whispered John, as he lingered behind. "I'll wait and help him in."

The door admitted into a long paved passage, terminating in a little damp "green." John Buchanan remained at the door, while Cuthbert followed the steps of his eager conductor, through the passage, and up an "outside stair," into the house. She seemed very eager, and only looking round to see that he followed her, ran into a little parlour.

"Harry is coming. He has been helping somebody, and has hurt himself, Martha; the gentleman will tell you," exclaimed poor Harry's anxious advocate, placing herself beside the chair where sat a tall faded woman, sternly composed and quiet.

"Is Harry hurt?" cried another younger and prettier person, who occupied the seat of honour by the fireside.

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