Chapter 4 - Page 2

it was far on in the small hours by the
Tron bell; when suddenly there came a creak, a jar, a
faint light. Softly he clambered out of bed and up to a
false window which looked upon another room, and there,
by the glimmer of a thieves' lantern, was his good friend
the Deacon in a mask. It is characteristic of the town
and the town's manners that this little episode should
have been quietly tided over, and quite a good time
elapsed before a great robbery, an escape, a Bow Street
runner, a cock-fight, an apprehension in a cupboard in
Amsterdam, and a last step into the air off his own
greatly-improved gallows drop, brought the career of
Deacon William Brodie to an end. But still, by the
mind's eye, he may be seen, a man harassed below a
mountain of duplicity, slinking from a magistrate's
supper-room to a thieves' ken, and pickeering among the
closes by the flicker of a dark lamp.

Or where the Deacon is out of favour, perhaps some
memory lingers of the great plagues, and of fatal houses
still unsafe to enter within the memory of man. For in
time of pestilence the discipline had been sharp and
sudden, and what we now call 'stamping out contagion' was
carried on with deadly rigour. The officials, in their
gowns of grey, with a white St. Andrew's cross on back
and breast, and a white cloth carried before them on a
staff, perambulated the city, adding the terror of man's
justice to the fear of God's visitation. The dead they
buried on the Borough Muir; the living who had concealed
the sickness were drowned, if they were women, in the
Quarry Holes, and if they were men, were hanged and
gibbeted at their own doors; and wherever the evil had
passed, furniture was destroyed and houses closed. And
the most bogeyish part of the story is about such houses.
Two generations back they still stood dark and empty;
people avoided them as they passed by; the boldest
schoolboy only shouted through the keyhole and made off;
for within, it was supposed, the plague lay ambushed like
a basilisk, ready to flow forth and spread blain and
pustule through the city. What a terrible next-door
neighbour for superstitious citizens! A rat scampering
within would send a shudder through the stoutest heart.
Here, if you like, was a sanitary parable, addressed by
our uncleanly forefathers to their own neglect.

And then we have Major Weir; for although even his
house is now demolished, old Edinburgh cannot clear
herself of his unholy memory. He and his sister lived
together in an odour of sour piety. She was a marvellous
spinster; he had a rare gift of supplication, and was
known among devout admirers by the name of Angelical
Thomas. 'He was a tall, black man, and ordinarily looked