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After this terrible escape I went to a barn, and was looking through a hole and saw two men come to where Geordie's body lay, when a knot of people gathered round, and about ten or eleven o'clock he was buried.
These, however, are envious people, who are jealous of Geordie's habitual association with lords and dukes, and who resent the trivial stiffness which is no doubt apparent in his manner to ordinary people for the first few days after the illustrious persons referred to have reluctantly permitted him to withdraw from them the light of his countenance.
Great was Geordie's joy, therefore, when at last he was taken on there in the capacity of a coal-picker, to clear the loads from stones and rubbish. It wasn't a very dignified position, to be sure, but it was the first step that led the way to the construction of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway.
His plans wad tell him as muckle about the workin's, and I ken, at least, he's never been in Geordie's place since it was started, an' there's nae ither places drivin' up sae far as this. They're a' stoppit afore they come this length; an' forby, frae what Rundell has let drap the day, he never kent that the coal was being worked as far up as this.
I had often marvelled at this; for Geordie's last word to his little daughter had been a promise to meet her in the land o' the leal. But it is not chains alone that make a slave. After a little further conversation, I sent the poor woman home, assuring her that I would do the best I could for Geordie. Which promise I proceeded to fulfill.
She began to wish that she was safe back in her granny's cottage again, but consoled herself by thinking that as long as she had hold of Geordie's hand nothing very dreadful could possibly happen.
On the day after Geordie's death Grace had gone to see the last resting-place destined for him in the little village churchyard. It was a dreary patch of ground which looked as if the suns ray's never penetrated through its high walls on the graves below. Crumbling grey-lichened headstones peeped dismally from among the long dank grass, and the little paths were overgrown with weeds.
"And no doubt that would be the way to have us meet," cried I. "But as you'll be in King Lewie's coat, and I'll be in King Geordie's, we'll have a dainty meeting of it." "There's some sense in that," he admitted. "An advocate, then, it'll have to be," I continued, "and I think it a more suitable trade for a gentleman that was three times disarmed.
Many wondered at his calmness a' the while the body lay i' the house afore the burial; but it was the calmness o' despair; he just seemed to me like ane turned to stane. The first thing that roused him was the sound o' the first earth that fell on puir Geordie's coffin. He gie'd ae bitter groan, an' wad hae fa'n to the earth had'na a kind neebor supported him.
Billy Breen was found by Geordie late in the afternoon in his own old and deserted shack, breathing heavily, covered up in his filthy, mouldering bed-clothes, with a half-empty bottle of whisky at his side. Geordie's grief and rage were beyond even his Scotch control. He spoke few words, but these were of such concentrated vehemence that no one felt the need of Abe's assistance in vocabulary.
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