Henry Burns

“ You know the night you went to Henry Burns’s party you ate so many nuts and raisins you woke up dreaming that somebody was trying to tie you into a square knot, and when you got fully awake you wished somebody would, and I had to get up and pour Jamaica ginger into you. Don’t try to eat more than enough for three ordinary persons this time, Joe, and you’ll be all right. ”

“ Pinning a blanket up over the transom to hide the light, and stopping his keyhole, to prevent any ray of light from penetrating into the hallway, and throwing down a blanket at the door-sill for the same purpose, Henry Burns lighted both his lamps, carefully locked his door, and made ready to entertain his guests.
“It’s not just according to the rules of etiquette,” he said, producing a package from the basket, “but we’ll have to start on the ice-cream first before it melts. Then we’ll work back along the line, to salad and ginger ale.” ”

“ Burns was the warm, personal friend of the [Pg 58] best people in every district in or near which he lived. He must have been a good man who could count among his friends such men and women as the following: Lord Glencairn, Mrs Dunlop, the Earl of Eglintoun, Dr Moore, Dr M’Kenzie, Gavin Hamilton, Hon. Henry Erskine, the Duchess of Gordon, Right Rev. Bishop Geddes, Robert Graham of Fintry, Robert Riddell, Robert Aiken, the Earl of Buchan, Prof. Dugald Stewart, Dr Candlish, Sir John Whitefoord, John Murdoch, Dr Blacklock, Dr Hugh Blair, Alex. ”

“ It remained for an Irishman and an American to set forth the true details of the life of Allan Ramsay, and for another American to write the only complete and scholarly study of Henry Mackenzie and his times.
Many Scotsmen besides Burns shared his passionate defence of Queen Mary; not so many shared his general patriotism. Here Burns, very Scot of very Scot, belonged to a generation which had passed, though he prepared the way for one to come. ”

“ Oft thy image is my theme,
As I wander on the green:
See, my cheek the colour flies
And love’s sweet hope within me dies;
for oh! my dear Henry, thou’st betrayed
Thy love with thy dear cottage maid. ”

“ Blaine spoke with quiet confidence, unmixed with any boastfulness. “I cannot lose; there is too much at stake.”
Late that night, Anita Lawton was awakened from a tortured, feverish dream by the violent ringing of the telephone bell at her bedside. The voice of Henry Blaine, fraught with a latent tension of suppressed elation, came to her over the wire. ”

“ Henry Blaine smiled his quiet, slow, illuminating smile, and walking around the table, laid his hand on Morrow’s shoulder. “Why, boy, you haven’t even commenced. Detective work is ‘petty,’ you said? ‘Petty’ because we take every case, no matter how insignificant, if it can right a wrong? You call our profession ‘sordid,’ because we accept pay for the work of our brains and bodies! Why should we not? Are we treacherous, because we meet malefactors, and fight them with their own weapons? ”

“ But for you, there would never have been any––to-morrow.”
“That’s true!” The young man’s arm encircled the girl’s slender waist as they stood together in the glowing sunlight, but his other hand gripped the detective’s. “We owe life, our happiness, the future, everything to you!”
And so Henry Blaine left them.
At the door he turned and glanced back, and the sight his eyes beheld was a goodly one for him to carry away with him into the world––a sight as old as the ages, as new as the hour, as prescient as the hours and ages to come. Just a man and a maid, sunshine and happiness, youth and love! ”

“ You have dared to strike blindly, in your mad thirst for publicity, at a man infinitely beyond your reach. Your insolence ceases to be amusing! If you try to push this ridiculous accusation, I shall ruin you, Henry Blaine!”
“No man is beyond my reach who has broken the 261 law.” The detective’s voice was quietly controlled, yet each word pierced the silence like a sword-thrust. “I have been threatened with ruin, with death, many times by criminals of all classes, from defaulting financiers to petty thieves, but I still live, and my fortunes have not been materially impaired. ”

“ The detective breathed more freely. Evidently Ramon Hamilton had had the good sense to keep from her his recent danger.
“You can be sure of nothing, Miss Lawton, save the fact that Mr. Hamilton is not dead,” Henry Blaine said earnestly. “You do not realize, perhaps, the one salient fact that criminal experts who deal with cases of disappearance have long since recognized––the most difficult of all things to conceal or do away with in a large city is a dead body.” ”

“ He decided now to exchange Mossgiel for Ellisland farm, about six miles from Dumfries. As soon as he was able to leave Edinburgh, he had hurried to Mossgiel and gone through a justice-of-peace marriage with Jean Armour. Burns, with all his faults, was an honest and a high-spirited man, and he loved the mother of his children. Had he hesitated to make her his wife, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian, or that misery of miseries, the remorse of a poet. ”

“ His heart lesion intensified the nervous instability he had shown as a child, and thereby contributed to the perennially reckless conduct of his manhood. In all his life, as in his death, he continued to pay the heaviest share of the price of his father’s struggle to hold on at Mount Oliphant.
A boy seldom realizes that he is overstraining himself. What irked Burns at the time, far more than ‘the unceasing moil of a galley-slave’, was the fact that he was almost wholly cut off from social intercourse. ”

“ All this time Burns was alternating between Mauchline and Ellisland, to the detriment of his interests in each place. A man absent from his farm every other fortnight could scarcely expect work to go forward quickly, but there were no living accommodations for Jean and young Robert until in October a neighbour, moving into Dumfries for the winter, offered Burns the use of his house. But the periods of absence roused Burns once more to lyric fervour for Jean, and the man who six months earlier had pledged undying devotion to Clarinda composed ‘Of a’ the airts’ in tribute to his wife. ”

“ Inquiry into his ancestry is fruitless, because nothing in his ancestry explains Burns, any more than the dull line of squires into which he was born can explain Shelley, or a London livery-stable Keats. Burns’s family produced no genius before him; it produced none after him. It is enough to record that William Burnes, the poet’s father, came of peasant stock from the eastern Lowlands of Scotland. The poet [Pg 36] cherished the belief that some of his forebears had been out in the ’Fifteen in the train of George Keith, tenth Earl Marischal, but documentary proof is lacking. ”

“ As he strode indignantly from the room, Anita turned anxiously to Henry Blaine.
“Oh, what will he do?” she whispered. “He is really a power, a money-power, you know, Mr. Blaine! Where will he go now?”
“Straight to his confrère Carlis, and tell him that the game is up.” The detective spoke with brisk confidence. “He’ll be tailed by my men, anyway, so we shall soon have a report. Don’t see anyone, on any pretext whatsoever, and don’t leave the house, Miss Lawton. I will instruct Wilkes on my way out, that you are to be at home to no one. I must be getting back to my office now. ”

“ One of the most interesting of all the pictures of the lives of the world’s literary leaders is the picture of Robert Burns, after a day of toil on the farm, walking from Mossgiel farm, when his evening meal was over, two miles to his favourite seat in the woods on Ballochmyle estate, and sitting there on the high bank of the Ayr in the long Scottish gloaming, and often on in the moonlight, ‘shut in with God,’ revealing in sublime form the visions that thrilled his soul. ”

“ The foremost group consists of women who profoundly stirred him, and on whom for a time at least he concentrated his intellect and his affections as well as his desires. In this group belong Jean Armour, Margaret Chalmers, Clarinda, and probably Maria Riddell. Next come the women who engaged his passing fancy, and for whom he felt some tenderness, but who did not influence him deeply or long. Among these are Betty Paton, Anne Park, Jean Lorimer, and Jessie Lewars. A woman who appealed to Burns on either of these bases need not have been his mistress ”

“ I must know.”
“You shall, Miss Lawton. I think the time has come when you should no longer be left in the dark. I will tell Mr. Hamilton when he comes to me this afternoon for the interview we have arranged that you must know the whole story.”
But Ramon Hamilton failed to appear for the promised interview. Henry Blaine called up his office and his home, but was unable to locate him. Then Miss Lawton began making anxious inquiries, and finally the mother of the young lawyer appealed to the detective, but in vain. Late that night the truth was established beyond peradventure of a doubt. ”

“ But now,” he continued eloquently, his voice ringing with gladness, “the bright sunlight is peeping around the fast disappearing cloud, warming my very soul with its joyous rays. Oh, my lord, if ever the name of Robert Burns should e’en become familiar to his countrymen,’twill be through your graciousness, your benevolence, to a poor unknown, humble plowman,” and his eyes filled with tears of love and gratitude for his noble benefactor. ”

“ I have always thought that no person could have a just idea of the extent of Burns’s talents who had not an opportunity to hear him converse. His discrimination of character was great beyond that of any person I ever knew....’ The surgeon introduced Burns as a poet to his own friend and patron, Sir John Whitefoord, who had previously known of the young farmer only as an earnest member of St. James’s Lodge; he also gave an introduction to Captain Andrew Erskine of Edinburgh, Boswell’s friend, and claimed to have been the first to bring the Kilmarnock Poems to the attention of Hugh Blair. ”

“ He was equally so in his religion, his politics, and, above all, his patriotism. Only in this last was he untypical of his generation. Yet such statements are misleadingly simple. All they can safely mean is that Burns, like all men in all ages, was influenced in thought and conduct by the environment in which he lived. Nevertheless, in a nation so small and self-contained as Scotland in the eighteenth century the pressure of environment was felt to a degree unrealized in larger and more cosmopolitan communities. ”

“ If ever a woman threw herself at a man’s head Agnes M’Lehose did, and Burns was not the man to refuse such a challenge. A letter to Richard Brown in the early days of his infatuation leaves no doubt that he thought he had made a conquest; but he had reckoned without Clarinda’s Calvinism and her social traditions.
The affair might have spent itself in a passing flirtation had not chance, in the form of a drunken driver who overturned a coach and dislocated the poet’s knee, confined him to his room for several weeks. ”

“ The Green Imp ran at its quietest along the city streets, then through the thinning suburbs, and finally, with the lights all behind them, the open country ahead, the long, low car came out upon the straight highway which leads a hundred miles before it comes again to any but insignificant hamlets and small, rustic inns.
Burns had said little thus far, but as he glanced over his shoulder at the now distant lights of the city he suddenly spoke low, out of the quiet:
“We're out of reach of everything and everybody; nobody even knows the road we're taking. ”

“ And the judgment which Findlater thus expressed at the beginning of the poet’s Excise career he reaffirmed after his death. Others testified to their regard in deeds as well as words. Though Burns continued to display his life-long preference for the company of extravagant and outré sorts of people the best men in the Excise were the ones who esteemed him most. John Lewars, for example, brother of the Jessie of the songs, was a man of some education, and above the level of the common riding-officer. His father had been Collector at Dumfries, and thus a man of standing in the community. ”

“ Not content with being gauger, farmer, and poet, Burns took a lively interest in everything affecting the welfare of the parish and the well-being of its inhabitants. For this was no poet of the study, holding himself aloof from the affairs of the world, and fearing the contamination of his kind. Burns was alive all-round, and always acted his part in the world as a husband and father; as a citizen and a man. He made himself the poet of humanity, because he himself was so intensely human, and joyed and sorrowed with his fellows. ”

“ The cries of Liberty and Equality and Fraternity were echoed in the North and enlisted as in England a motley collection of supporters who ranged from poetic idealists, like Burns and Wordsworth, through professional agitators like Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke to unprincipled rabble. Burns’s first public gesture of sympathy with the French Revolution came as a by-product of the most exciting episode in his career as an Excise officer. In the early spring of 1792 a smuggling schooner named the Rosamond was caught in the Solway. ”

“ If it turns out that there really is something crooked about it all, and Rockamore and the others are concerned in it, it will be the biggest conspiracy that was ever hatched in the world of high finance. You were right, dear, bless your woman’s intuition; we must have help. This matter must be thoroughly investigated. There is only one man in America to-day, who is capable of carrying it through, successfully. I shall send at once for the Master Mind.”
“The Master Mind?”
“Yes, dear––Henry Blaine, the most eminent detective the English-speaking world has produced.” ”