This brought the two into conversation; when
Jean, with a somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if "he had yet got any
of the lasses to like him as well as his dog?" It is one of the
misfortunes of the professional Don Juan that his honour forbids him to
refuse battle; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon duty, or like
the sworn physician who must attend on all diseases. Burns accepted the
provocation; hungry hope reawakened in his heart; here was a
girl--pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and plainly not
averse to his attentions: it seemed to him once more as if love might
here be waiting him. Had he but known the truth! for this facile and
empty-headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirtation; and her
heart, from the first and on to the end of her story, was engaged by
another man. Burns once more commenced the celebrated process of
"battering himself into a warm affection"; and the proofs of his success
are to be found in many verses of the period. Nor did he succeed with
himself only; Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his
fascination, and early in the next year the natural consequence became
manifest. It was a heavy stroke for this unfortunate couple. They had
trifled with life, and were now rudely reminded of life's serious
issues. Jean awoke to the ruin of her hopes; the best she had now to
expect was marriage with a man who was a stranger to her dearest
thoughts; she might now be glad if she could get what she would never
have chosen. As for Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised
that his voyage of discovery had led him into a wrong hemisphere--that
he was not, and never had been, really in love with Jean. Hear him in
the pressure of the hour. "Against two things," he writes, "I am as
fixed as fate--staying at home, and owning her conjugally. The first,
by heaven, I will not do!--the last, by hell, I will never do!" And then
he adds, perhaps already in a more relenting temper: "If you see Jean,
tell her I will meet her, so God hold me in my hour of need." They met
accordingly; and Burns, touched with her misery, came down from these
heights of independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment of
marriage. It is the punishment of Don Juanism to create continually
false positions--relations of life which are wrong in themselves, and
which it is equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a
case. Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way; let us be
glad that Burns was better counselled by his heart. When we discover
that we can no longer be true, the next best is to be kind. I daresay he
came away from that interview not very content, but with a glorious
conscience; and as he went homeward, he would sing his favourite, "How
are Thy servants blest, O Lord!" Jean, on the other hand, armed with her
"lines," confided her position to the master-mason, her father, and his
wife. Burns and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin themselves
in their farm; the poet was an execrable match for any well-to-do
country lass; and perhaps old Armour had an inkling of a previous
attachment on his daughter's part. At least, he was not so much incensed
by her slip from virtue as by the marriage which had been designed to
cover it. Of this he would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the
acknowledgment only to appease her parents, and not at all from any
violent inclination to the poet, readily gave up the paper for
destruction; and all parties imagined, although wrongly, that the
marriage was thus dissolved. To a proud man like Burns here was a
crushing blow. The concession which had been wrung from his pity was now
publicly thrown back in his teeth. The Armour family preferred disgrace
to his connection. Since the promise, besides, he had doubtless been
busy "battering himself" back again into his affection for the girl;
and the blow would not only take him in his vanity, but wound him at the
heart. He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smarting affront manuscript
poetry was insufficient to console him. He must find a more powerful
remedy in good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set forth
again at once upon his voyage of discovery in quest of love. It is
perhaps one of the most touching things in human nature, as it is a
commonplace of psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or
confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find and lean upon
another. The universe could not be yet exhausted; there must be hope and
love waiting for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this poor,
insulted poet ran once more upon his fate. There was an innocent and
gentle Highland nursery-maid at service in a neighbouring family; and he
had soon battered himself and her into a warm affection and a secret
engagement. Jean's marriage lines had not been destroyed till March 13,
1786; yet all was settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, May
14, when they met for the last time, and said farewell with rustic
solemnities upon the banks of Ayr. They each wet their hands in a
stream, and, standing one on either bank, held a Bible between them as
they vowed eternal faith. Then they exchanged Bibles, on one of which
Burns, for greater security, had inscribed texts as to the binding
nature of an oath; and surely, if ceremony can do aught to fix the
wandering affections, here were two people united for life. Mary came of
a superstitious family, so that she perhaps insisted on these rites; but
they must have been eminently to the taste of Burns at this period; for
nothing would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to stay his
tottering constancy. Events of consequence now happened thickly in the poet's life. His book
was announced; the Armours sought to summon him at law for the aliment
of the child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the sheets; he
was under an engagement for Jamaica, where Mary was to join him as his
wife; now he had "orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard
the _Nancy_, Captain Smith"; now his chest was already on the road to
Greenock; and now, in the wild autumn weather on the moorland, he
measures verses of farewell:--

  "The bursting tears my heart declare;
   Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr!" But the great Master Dramatist had secretly another intention for the
piece; by the most violent and complicated solution, in which death and
birth and sudden fame all play a part as interposing deities, the
act-drop fell upon a scene of transformation. Jean was brought to bed of
twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the Burnses took the boy to
bring up by hand, while the girl remained with her mother. The success
of the book was immediate and emphatic; it put £20 at once into the
author's purse; and he was encouraged upon all hands to go to Edinburgh
and push his success in a second and larger edition. Third and last in
these series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Mossgiel Farm
for Robert.