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It was as if the bones of a bleached skeleton should join themselves on some forgotten plain, and look about them for the vanished flesh. To be dead it is not necessary to be in the grave. There are places where the worms creep about the heart instead of the body. The penitentiary is one of these. David Culross had been in the penitentiary twenty years.
Culross had requested a ticket to Chicago. He naturally said Chicago. In the long colorless days it had been in Chicago that all those endlessly repeated scenes had been laid. Walking up the street now with that wavering ineffectual gait, these scenes came back to surge in his brain like waters ceaselessly tossed in a wind-swept basin.
It was six months after his entrance into his silent abode that a letter came for him. "By rights, Culross," said the warden, "I should not give this letter to you. It isn't the sort we approve of. But you're in for a good spell, and if there is anything that can make life seem more tolerable, I don't know but you're entitled to it. At least, I'm not the man to deny it to you."
And yet the journey was only to Stirling. My father had received a commission to paint a view of the castle as seen from the ruins of Cambuskenneth Abbey, situated a few miles from the town. We started from Newhaven by a small steamboat, passing, on our way up the Firth, Queensferry, Culross, and Alloa.
We returned to Blair-Adam in the evening, through "the wind but and the rain." For June weather it is the most ungenial I have seen. The beauty of Culross consists in magnificent terraces rising on the sea-beach, and commanding the opposite shore of Lothian; the house is repairing in the style of James the Sixth. The windows have pediments like Heriot's Work.
The curtain lifted. A middle-aged man stood there looking at him. "Culross," said he, "I'm disappointed in you. I didn't mean to listen, but I couldn't help hearing what you said just now. I don't blame you particularly. Young men will be fools. And I do not in any way mean to insult you when I tell you to stop your coming here.
"The pedlar, your honour means?" retorted Andrew "but ca' him what ye wull, they're a great convenience in a country-side that's scant o' borough-towns like this Northumberland That's no the case, now, in Scotland; there's the kingdom of Fife, frae Culross to the East Nuik, it's just like a great combined city sae mony royal boroughs yoked on end to end, like ropes of ingans, with their hie-streets and their booths, nae doubt, and their kraemes, and houses of stane and lime and fore-stairs Kirkcaldy, the sell o't, is langer than ony town in England."
"Man!" cried Alan, "if I make a boat, I'll make a body to take it back again! All night, then, we walked through the north side of the Carse, under the high line of the Ochil mountains; and by Alloa and Clackmannan and Culross, all of which we avoided: and about ten in the morning, mighty hungry and tired, came to the little clachan of Limekilns.
David Culross had not walked two blocks before he was seized with an almost uncontrollable desire to beg to be shielded once more in that safe and shameful retreat from which he had just been released. A horrible perception of the largeness of the world swept over him. Space and eternity could seem no larger to the usual man than earth that snug and insignificant planet looked to David Culross.
Yet he too experiences the singula prædantur anni, and has lost something since I last saw him. If his appearance renders old age tolerable, it does not make it desirable. But I fear when death comes we shall be unwilling for all that to part with our bundle of sticks. Sir Robert amuses himself with repairing the old House of Culross, built by the Lord Bruce of Kinloss.
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