A few days after that, Robert was well enough to visit the manse of Ruthwell and have a cup of tea with the minister’s wife, her daughters and a friend of theirs. It was a lovely sunny afternoon. The friend later described the visit: ‘His altered appearance excited much silent sympathy; and the evening being beautiful, and the sun shining brightly through the casement, Miss Craig was afraid the light might be too much for him, and rose with the view of letting down the window-blinds. Burns immediately guessed what she meant; and, regarding the young lady with a look of great benignity, said: “Thank you, my dear, for your kind attention: but oh, let him shine: he will not shine long for me!”’
While he was at Brow, Robert managed to write a few letters. One was a final despairing plea for reconciliation with Mrs Dunlop. He was heartbroken when it was ignored. Well aware of and bitterly resenting the malicious slanders which were circulating about him and no doubt would increase after he was gone, he wrote to another friend, ‘Some of our folks about the Excise Office, Edinburgh, had and perhaps still have concerns and prejudices against me as being a drunken, dissipated character. – I might be all this, you know, and yet be an honest fellow, but you know that. – I am an honest fellow and nothing of this.’
Another letter was to his cousin James, who on hearing of Robert’s circumstances, had earlier written offering financial assistance. Robert wrote, ‘When you offered me money assistance – little did I think I would want it so soon … A rascal of a haberdasher to whom I owe a considerable bill taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process against me and will infallibly put my emaciated body into jail. – Will you be so good as to accommodate me, and that by return of post, with ten pound. – O James! did you know that the pride of my heart, you would feel double for me! Alas! I am not used to beg!’
The haberdasher’s bill for a few pounds had only been a run-of-the-mill letter sent out to every customer reminding them of outstanding payments due. By this time, however, Robert was in such a feverish and weakened state, he had become confused and reverted to the horrors of penury that had been his father’s fate and had blighted his childhood.
He was in torment too with the fear of what might happen to his own children. He had an urgent need to get back to them and his bonnie Jean, who was in the last stages of her latest pregnancy. He wrote to her to tell her he was returning to Dumfries: ‘My dearest love …’
Oh, how he loved and needed her.
35
It was a sickness of the heart and mind. Alexander knew it. It had taken such root in him, it reached to his very soul. He struggled to control it but it was always there – even when Burns was taken ill, even when he had moved to Brow, even when he saw the man was dying, he could not completely banish the blackness in himself. He could not capture again the light of love he had once felt for his friend.
For a time, Alexander had thought things had changed. Isobel stopped speaking to Burns. She held herself aloof. She even passed him on the street. But Susanna kept trying to make excuses for him, kept insisting that nothing was the poet’s fault. It was the foolish and spiteful young officers who had played a malicious trick on Burns who were to blame. Isobel began to soften. He could see it. Then they learned that Maria Riddell had contacted Burns and reawakened their friendship.
Susanna determined to visit him and Alexander felt he had to accompany her. They even visited him in Brow. He could see that Burns had become very fond of Susanna but he guessed, as with Ainsley’s sister, that Burns would never flirt with his friend’s sister. However, Burns had given Susanna a poem, which she had allowed no-one to see. So precious was it to her, she carried it about with her and was often seen reading it over to herself. She must have it well off by heart by now. But she was a strange girl at times. He couldn’t make out whether she liked the poem, or it distressed her.
Then Isobel started talking of going with them to visit Burns. Alexander forbade it, saying that she would be too distressed at the sight of him. Susanna agreed with this.
‘Oh, Isobel, it would break your heart. It breaks my heart to look at him in his present state. If he improves a little, I shall let you know and we will go together. Alexander is right – knowing you to be a lady of such sensitivity, he realises, as I do, that you would be too upset.’
‘Susanna,’ Alexander explained, ‘has gone through such trauma when she witnessed her husband’s suffering. It has prepared her to some extent but you, my dear, have had no experience of illness.’
Susanna said, ‘I’m trying to persuade Alexander to overrule Maxwell, Robert’s doctor, and do something to help the poet. Maxwell is doing him no good whatsoever. Quite the reverse, I think.’
Alexander sighed. ‘Maxwell is Robert’s friend, Susanna. Robert has total faith in him and I’m sure the good doctor is doing his very best.’
Of this Alexander had no doubt. He also knew that Maxwell’s best was not good enough. He knew that despite exercise and cold water bathing being the generally accepted treatment used by every medical man for miles around, it was not good enough. He believed that rest and warmth would have been a far more successful treatment for Robert’s rheumatic fever and what, he felt sure, was a serious heart condition resulting from the fever – unlike Maxwell, who had diagnosed it as ‘flying gout’.
However, he, Doctor Alexander Wallace, had too often been pooh-poohed and disbelieved for his ‘fancy modern notions’. Patients in Ayrshire had deserted him in droves in preference for his father’s old-fashioned methods. They would do so again if he tried. Burns would prefer to continue putting his trust in his much-loved friend, Maxwell. Sometimes, sitting by the bedside, he caught Burns staring at him with large, sad eyes and he wondered with a little spurt of panic if there was reproach in that stare, if Burns could see what was in his mind and heart and soul.
He would quickly take Burns’ hand in his, and smile at him, and ask him if there was anything he could do for him. Burns would smile in return and shake his head.
Susanna would sit at the bedside and she and Burns would smile at each other, almost as if they shared a secret. Or there was some unspoken understanding between them that he was not privy to. Alexander suspected that Susanna did not want to share Burns with Isobel, and that was why she had persuaded his wife to stay away. But he knew that Isobel would come sooner or later. He tried not to think of that. He could not bear to see her smile at Burns and look at him with a tenderness and love that she had never shown to him.
But Burns would die and that would be an end of it. He tried not to think of that either. It made him feel emotionally confused, sad and agonisingly guilty. He should have told Burns what he thought of the daily painful, courageous walk into the icy waters of the Solway. He should have taken his friend in his arms and physically stopped him. He should wrapped him in a warm blanket and led him back to warmth and safety.
But such thoughts were unbearable now. He told himself instead that he could not have gone against another doctor’s advice. It would have been unethical to interfere in the treatment of another doctor’s patient. Anyway, Robert would not have allowed it. The doctor in question was one of his most admired and closest friends.
No, he’d done what he could by visiting Robert as often as possible, and being there to try to support him by his company and loyal friendship. He had also tried to help and advise Jean who was in the last stages of her pregnancy. He advised her to rest. He told her she needed to get someone in to nurse Robert. She had taken his advice and now a neighbour’s daughter came in regularly. A young woman called Jessie Lewars. At Burns’ request she sang all his songs to him and her sweet singing voice seemed to soothe him.
One day, with hardly enough strength to lift a pen, Robert wrote a poem for her.
O wert thou in the cauld blast
On yonder lea, on yonder lea,
My plaidie to the angry airt,
I’d shelter thee, I’d shelter thee.
Or did misfortune’s bitter storms
&nbs
p; Around thee blaw, around thee blaw;
Thy bield should be my bosom,
To share it a’, to share it a’.
Or were I in the wildest waste,
Sae black and bare, sae black and bare,
That desert were a paradise,
If thou wert there, if thou wert there;
Or were I monarch o’ the globe,
Wi’ thee to reign, wi’ thee to reign;
The brightest jewel in my crown
Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.
The facility with which he’d thought of such a beautiful poem, of any poem at all in such impossibly difficult circumstances, forced Alexander to admit to himself that the man must be a born genius.
Every time he and Susanna went to see Burns now, they had to crush through crowds that had gathered in the street outside his door. Word had spread around that he was dying and Dumfries had become like a town besieged. The last time they’d gone, Burns’ friend Syme and another fellow Volunteer, John Gibson, were at the bedside with tears in their eyes. Burns managed with some of his old, wry humour, ‘Don’t let the awkward squad fire over me, John.’
When Doctor Maxwell arrived, Burns said, ‘What has brought you here? I am but a poor crow, and not worth picking. I haven’t feathers enough to carry me to my grave.’ He pointed to his pistols. ‘Take these, Maxwell. I couldn’t leave them in better hands.’ Alexander knew that this was meant to serve as payment for the doctor’s bills and Maxwell knew it too.
Maxwell sent Burns’ children across the road to Jessie Lewars’ home so that the poet could have peace and quiet. Jean was ordered to the next room and to bed. After a time, Syme and Gibson became so overcome by emotion that they had to leave. Half way through the night, Maxwell also left, promising to return first thing in the morning.
Alexander could see that Burns was not liable to last until his doctor friend returned and so he and Susanna sat on. At close on five o’clock in the morning, Alexander whispered to Susanna, ‘I’ll go and tell Jean to get up and come through so that she can say goodbye.’
Susanna looked round at him with large, tragic eyes, then turned back to the bed and leaned forward to take Robert in her arms and lay her cheek against his. When Alexander came back he saw the poet had lost his fight for life. Susanna was still lying against him, arms around him, her tears wetting his face.
Alexander pulled her away and led her outside. She was weeping helplessly, her beautiful poem echoing in her mind, the loving tenderness of it melting away all her fears.
Lang hae we parted been,
Lassie, my dearie;
Now we are met again,
Lassie, lie near me.
A’ that I hae endur’d,
Lassie, my dearie,
Here in thy arms is cur’d –
Lassie, lie near me.
Alexander was beyond weeping. He had suddenly realised that although Robert Burns the man had gone, his words would live on with everyone, forever.
And for auld lang syne, my jo,
For auld lang syne,
We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,
For auld lang syne …
Other B&W titles
by Margaret Thomson Davis
THE BREADMAKERS SAGA
THE NEW BREADMAKERS
THE CLYDESIDERS TRILOGY
THE TOBACCO LORDS TRILOGY
T DEADLY DECEPTION
THE DARK SIDE OF PLEASURE
BURNING AMBITION
THE GLASGOW BELLE
LIGHT AND DARK
COPYRIGHT
First published 2004
by Black & White Publishing Ltd
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www.blackandwhitepublishing.com
This electronic edition published in 2014
ISBN: 978 1 84502 671 4 in EPub format
ISBN: 978 1 84502 078 1 in paperback format
Copyright © Margaret Thomson Davis
The right of Margaret Thomson Davis to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Ebook compilation by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay
A Darkening of the Heart Page 25
