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The Shoes of Fortune

by Neil Munro · English · Gutenberg #43732 · 536,550 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Shoes of Fortune

Author: Neil Munro

Illustrator: A. S. Boyd


        
Release date: September 15, 2013 [eBook #43732]
                Most recently updated: March 8, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43732

Credits: Produced by David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHOES OF FORTUNE ***




Produced by David Widger






THE SHOES OF FORTUNE

HOW THEY BROUGHT TO MANHOOD LOVE ADVENTURE AND CONTENT AS ALSO INTO
DIVERS PERILS ON LAND AND SEA IN FOREIGN PARTS AND IN AN ALIEN ARMY PAUL
GREIG OF THE HAZEL DEN IN SCOTLAND ONE TIME PURSER OF 'THE SEVEN SISTERS'
BRIGANTINE OF HULL AND LATE LIEUTENANT IN THE REGIMENT D'AUVERGNE ALL
AS WRIT BY HIM AND NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME SET FORTH

By Neil Munro

Illustrated by A. S. Boyd





THE SHOES OF FORTUNE




CHAPTER I

NARRATES HOW I CAME TO QUIT THE STUDY OF LATIN AND THE LIKE, AND TAKE TO
HARD WORK IN A MOORLAND COUNTRY

It is an odd thing, chance--the one element to baffle the logician and
make the scheming of the wisest look as foolish in the long run as the
sandy citadel a child builds upon the shore without any thought of the
incoming tide. A strange thing, chance; and but for chance I might this
day be the sheriff of a shire, my head stuffed with the tangled phrase
and sentiment of interlocutors, or maybe no more than an advocate
overlooked, sitting in John's Coffeehouse in Edinburgh--a moody soured
man with a jug of claret, and cursing the inconsistencies of preferment
to office. I might have been that, or less, if it had not been for so
trifling a circumstance as the burning of an elderly woman's batch of
scones. Had Mistress Grant a more attentive eye to her Culross griddle,
what time the scones for her lodgers, breakfast were a-baking forty
years ago, I would never have fled furth my native land in a mortal
terror of the gallows: had her griddle, say, been higher on the
swee-chain by a link or two, Paul Greig would never have foregathered
with Dan Risk, the blackguard skipper of a notorious craft; nor pined
in a foreign jail; nor connived, unwitting, at a prince's murder; nor
marched the weary leagues of France and fought there on a beggar's
wage. And this is not all that hung that long-gone day upon a woman's
stair-head gossip to the neglect of her _cuisine_, for had this woman
been more diligent at her baking I had probably never seen my Isobel
with a lover's eye.

Well, here's one who can rarely regret the past except that it is gone.
It was hard, it was cruel often; dangers the most curious and unexpected
beset me, and I got an insight to deep villainies whereof man may be
capable; yet on my word, if I had the parcelling out of a second life
for myself, I think I would have it not greatly differing from the
first, that seems in God's providence like to end in the parish where
it started, among kent and friendly folk. I would not swear to it, yet I
fancy I would have Lucky Grant again gossiping on her stair-head and
her scones burned black, that Mackellar, my fellow-lodger, might make me
once more, as he used to do, the instrument of his malcontent.

I mind, as it were yesterday, his gloomy look at the platter that morn's
morning. “Here they are again!” cried he, “fired to a cinder; it's
always that with the old wife, or else a heart of dough. For a bawbee I
would throw them in her face.”

“Well, not so much as that.” said I, “though it is mighty provoking.”

“I'm not thinking of myself,” said he, always glooming at the platter
with his dark, wild Hielan' eye. “I'm not thinking of myself,” said he,
“but it's something by way of an insult to you, that had to complain of
Sunday's haddocks.”

“Oh, as to them,” quo' I, “they did brawly for me; 'twas you put your
share in your pocket and threw it away on the Green. Besides the scones
are not so bad as they look”--I broke one and ate; “they're owre good at
least for a hungry man like me to send back where they came from.”

His face got red. “What's that rubbish about the haddocks and the
Green?” said he. “You left me at my breakfast when you went to the Ram's
Horn Kirk.”

“And that's true, Jock,” said I; “but I think I have made no' so bad a
guess. You were feared to affront the landlady by leaving her ancient
fish on the ashet, and you egged me on to do the grumbling.”

“Well, it's as sure as death, Paul,” said he shamefacedly, “I hate to
vex a woman. And you're a thought wrong in your guess”--he laughed at
his own humour as he said it--“for when you were gone to your kirk I
transferred my share of the stinking fish to your empty plate.”

He jouked his head, but scarcely quick enough, for my Sallust caught him
on the ear. He replied with a volume of Buchanan the historian, the man
I like because he skelped the Lord's anointed, James the First, and for
a time there was war in Lucky Grant's parlour room, till I threw him
into the recess bed snibbed the door, and went abroad into the street
leaving my room-fellow for once to utter his own complaints.

I went out with the itch of battle on me, and that was the consequence
of a woman's havering while scones burned, and likewise my undoing,
for the High Street when I came to it was in the yeasty ferment of
encountering hosts, their cries calling poor foolish Paul Greig like a
trumpet.

It had been a night and morning of snow, though I and Mackellar, so high
in Lucky Grant's chamber in Crombie's Land, had not suspected it. The
dull drab streets, with their crazy, corbelled gable-ends, had been
transformed by a silent miracle of heaven into something new and clean;
where noisome gutters were wont to brim with slops there was the napkin
of the Lord.

For ordinary I hated this town of my banishment; hated its tun-bellied
Virginian merchants, so constantly airing themselves upon the Tontine
piazza and seeming to suffer from prosperity as from a disease; and felt
no great love of its women--always so much the madame to a drab-coated
lad from the moorlands; suffered from its greed and stifled with the
stinks of it. “Gardyloo! Gardyloo! Gardyloo!” Faith! I hear that evening
slogan yet, and see the daunderers on the Rottenrow skurry like rats
into the closes to escape the cascades from the attic windows. And while
I think I loved learning (when it was not too ill to come by), and was
doing not so bad in my Humanities, the carven gateway of the college
in my two sessions of a scholar's fare never but scowled upon me as I
entered.

But the snow that morning made of the city a place wherein it was good
to be young, warm-clad, and hardy. It silenced the customary traffic of
the street, it gave the morning bells a song of fairydom and the valleys
of dream; up by-ordinary tall and clean-cut rose the crow-stepped walls,
the chimney heads, and steeples, and I clean forgot my constant fancy
for the hill of Ballageich and the heather all about it. And war raged.
The students faced 'prentice lads and the journeymen of the crafts
with volleys of snowballs; the merchants in the little booths ran
out tremulous and vainly cried the watch. Charge was made and
counter-charge; the air was thick with missiles, and close at hand
the silver bells had their merry sweet chime high over the city of my
banishment drowned by the voices taunting and defiant.

Merry was that day, but doleful was the end of it, for in the fight
I smote with a snowball one of the bailies of the burgh, who had come
waving his three-cocked hat with the pomp and confidence of an elected
man and ordering an instant stoppage of our war: he made more ado about
the dignity of his office than the breakage of his spectacles, and I was
haled before my masters, where I fear I was not so penitent as prudence
would advise.

Two days later my father came in upon Dawson's cart to convoy me
home. He saw the Principal, he saw the regents of the college, and up,
somewhat clashed and melancholy, he climbed to my lodging. Mackellar
fled before his face as it had been the face of the Medusa.

“Well, Paul,” said my father, “it seems we made a mistake about your
birthday.”

“Did you?” said I, without meaning, for I knew he was ironical.

“It would seem so, at any rate,” said he, not looking my airt at all,
but sideways to the window and a tremor in his voice. “When your mother
packed your washing last Wednesday and slipped the siller I was not
supposed to see into a stocking-foot, she said, 'Now he's twenty and the
worst of it over.' Poor woman! she was sadly out of her reckoning. I'm
thinking I have here but a bairn of ten. You should still be at the
dominie's.”

“I was not altogether to blame, father,” I cried. “The thing was an
accident.”

“Of course, of course,” said he soothingly. “Was't ever otherwise when
the devil joggled an elbow? Whatever it was, accident or design, it's a
session lost. Pack up, Paul, my very young boy, and we'll e'en make our
way quietly from this place where they may ken us.”

He paid the landlady her lawing, with sixpence over for her
motherliness, whereat she was ready to greet, and he took an end of my
blue kist down the stairs with me, and over with it like a common porter
to the carrier's stance.

A raw, raining day, and the rough highways over the hoof with slush of
melted snow, we were a chittering pair as we drove under the tilt of the
cart that came to the Mearns to meet us, and it was a dumb and solemn
home-coming for me.

Not that I cared much myself, for my lawyership thus cracked in the
shell, as it were I had been often seized with the notion that six
feet of a moor-lander, in a lustre gown and a horse-hair wig and a blue
shalloon bag for the fees, was a wastry of good material. But it was
the dad and her at home I thought of, and could put my neck below the
cartwheel for distressing. I knew what he thought of as he sat in the
cart corner, for many a time he had told me his plans; and now they were
sadly marred. I was to get as much as I could from the prelections of
Professor Reid, work my way through the furrows of Van Eck, Van Muyden,
and the Pandects, then go to Utrecht or Groningen for the final baking,
and come back to the desk of Coghill and Sproat, Writers to the Signet,
in Spreull's Land of Edinburgh; run errands between that dusty hole and
the taverns of Salamander Land, where old Sproat (that was my father's
doer) held long sederunts with his clients, to write a thesis finally,
and graduate at the art of making black look--not altogether white
perhaps, but a kind of dirty grey. I had been even privileged to try a
sampling of the lawyer's life before I went to college, in the chambers
of MacGibbon of Lanark town, where I spent a summer (that had been more
profitably passed in my father's fields), backing letters, fair-copying
drafts of lease and process, and indexing the letter-book. The last I
hated least of all, for I could have a half-sheet of foolscap between
the pages, and under MacGibbon's very nose try my hand at something
sombre in the manner of the old ancient ballads of the Border. Doing
that same once, I gave a wild cry and up with my inky hand and shook it.
“Eh! eh!” cried MacGibbon, thinking I had gone mad. “What ails ye?” “He
struck me with his sword!” said I like a fool, not altogether out of my
frenzy; and then the snuffy old body came round the corner of the desk,
keeked into the letter-book where I should have been doing his work, and
saw that I was wasting good paper with clinking trash. “Oh, sirs! sirs!
I never misused a minute of my youth in the like of that!” said he,
sneering, and the sneer hurt. “No, I daresay not,” I answered him.
“Perhaps ye never had the inclination--nor the art.”

I have gone through the world bound always to say what was in me, and
that has been my sore loss more than once; but to speak thus to an old
man, who had done me no ill beyond demonstrating the general world's
attitude to poetry and men of sentiment, was the blackest insolence. He
was well advised to send me home for a leathering at my father's hands.
And I got the leathering, too, though it was three months after. I had
been off in the interim upon a sloop ship out of Ayr.

But here I am havering, and the tilted cart with my father and me in it
toiling on the mucky way through the Meams; and it has escaped couping
into the Earn at the ford, and it has landed us at the gate of home; and
in all that weary journey never a word, good or ill, from the man that
loved me and my mother before all else in a world he was well content
with.

Mother was at the door; that daunted me.

“Ye must be fair starving, Paul,” quoth she softly with her hand on my
arm, and I daresay my face was blae with cold and chagrin. But my father
was not to let a disgrace well merited blow over just like that.

“Here's our little Paul, Katrine,” said he, and me towering a head or
two above the pair of them and a black down already on my face. “Here's
our little Paul. I hope you have not put by his bibs and daidlies, for
the wee man's not able to sup the good things of this life clean yet.”

And that was the last word of reproof I heard for my folly from my
father Quentin Greig.




CHAPTER II

MISS FORTUNE'S TRYST BY WATER OF EARN, AND HOW I MARRED THE SAME
UNWITTINGLY

For the most part of a year I toiled and moiled like any crofter's son
on my father's poor estate, and dreary was the weird I had to dree, for
my being there at all was an advertisement to the countryside of what a
fool was young Paul Greig. “The Spoiled Horn” was what they called me in
the neighbourhood (I learned it in the taunt of a drunken packman), for
I had failed at being the spoon I was once designed for, and there was
not a ne'er-do-weel peasant nor a bankrupt portioner came craving some
benefit to my father's door but made up for his deference to the laird
by his free manner with the laird's son. The extra tenderness of my
mother (if that were possible) only served to swell my rebel heart, for
I knew she was but seeking to put me in a better conceit of myself, and
I found a place whereof I had before been fond exceedingly assume a new
complexion. The rain seemed to fall constantly that year, and the earth
in spring was sodden and sour. Hazel Den House appeared sunk in the
rotten leafage of the winter long after the lambs came home and the
snipe went drumming on the marsh, and the rookery in the holm plantation
was busy with scolding parents tutoring their young. A solemn house at
its best--it is so yet, sometimes I think, when my wife is on a jaunt
at her sister's and Walter's bairns are bedded--it was solemn beyond all
description that spring, and little the better for the coming of summer
weather. For then the trees about it, that gave it over long billows of
untimbered countryside an aspect of dark importance, by the same token
robbed it (as I thought then) of its few amenities. How it got the name
of Hazel Den I cannot tell, for autumn never browned a nut there. It was
wych elm and ash that screened Hazel Den House; the elms monstrous and
grotesque with knotty growths: when they were in their full leaf behind
the house they hid the valley of the Clyde and the Highland hills, that
at bleaker seasons gave us a sense of companionship with the wide world
beyond our infield of stunted crops. The ash towered to the number of
two score and three towards the south, shutting us off from the view
there, and working muckle harm to our kitchen-garden. Many a time my
father was for cutting them down, but mother forbade it, though her
syboes suffered from the shade and her roses grew leggy and unblooming.
“That,” said she, “is the want of constant love: flowers are like
bairns; ye must be aye thinking of them kindly to make them thrive.” And
indeed there might be something in the notion, for her apple-ringie
and Dutch Admiral, jonquils, gillyflowers, and peony-roses throve
marvellously, better then they did anywhere in the shire of Renfrew
while she lived and tended them and have never been quite the same since
she died, even with a paid gardener to look after them.

A winter loud with storm, a spring with rain-rot in the fallen leaf, a
summer whose foliage but made our home more solitary than ever, a short
autumn of stifling heats--that was the year the Spoiled Horn tasted the
bitterness of life, the bitterness that comes from the want of an
aim (that is better than the best inheritance in kind) and from a
consciousness that the world mistrusts your ability. And to cap all,
there was no word about my returning to the prelections of Professor
Reid, for a reason which I could only guess at then, but learned later
was simply the want of money.

My father comported himself to me as if I were doomed to fall into a
decline, as we say, demanding my avoidance of night airs, preaching the
Horatian virtues of a calm life in the fields, checking with a reddened
face and a half-frightened accent every turn of the conversation that
gave any alluring colour to travel or adventure. Notably he was dumb,
and so was my mother, upon the history of his family. He had had four
brothers: three of them I knew were dead and their tombs not in Mearns
kirkyard; one of them, Andrew, the youngest, still lived: I feared it
might be in a bedlam, by the avoidance they made of all reference to
him. I was fated, then, for Bedlam or a galloping consumption--so I
apprehended dolefully from the mystery of my folk; and the notion sent
me often rambling solitary over the autumn moors, cultivating a not
unpleasing melancholy and often stringing stanzas of a solemn complexion
that I cannot recall nowadays but with a laugh at my folly.

A favourite walk of mine in these moods was along the Water of Earn,
where the river chattered and sang over rocks and shallows or plunged
thundering in its linn as it did ere I was born and shall do when I and
my story are forgotten. A pleasant place, and yet I nearly always had it
to myself alone.

I should have had it always to myself but for one person--Isobel Fortune
from the Kirkillstane. She seemed as little pleased to meet me there
as I was to meet her, though we had been brought up in the same school
together; and when I would come suddenly round a bend of the road and
she appeared a hundred yards off, I noticed that she half stopped and
seemed, as it were, to swither whether she should not turn and avoid me.
It would not have surprised me had she done so, for, to tell the truth,
I was no very cheery object to contemplate upon a pleasant highway, with
the bawbee frown of a poetic gloom upon my countenance and the most curt
of salutations as I passed. What she did there all her lone so often
mildly puzzled me, till I concluded she was on a tryst with some young
gentleman of the neighbourhood; but as I never saw sign of him, I did
not think myself so much the marplot as to feel bound to take another
road for my rambling. I was all the surer 'twas a lover she was out to
meet, because she reddened guiltily each time that we encountered (a
fine and sudden charm to a countenance very striking and beautiful, as I
could not but observe even then when weightier affairs engaged me); but
it seemed I was all in error, for long after she maintained she was,
like myself, indulging a sentimental humour that she found go very well
in tune with the noise of Earn Water.

As it was her habit to be busily reading when we thus met, I had little
doubt as to the ownership of a book that one afternoon I found on
the road not long after passing her. It was--of all things in the
world!--Hervey's “Meditations.”

“It's an odd graveyard taste for a lass of that stamp,” thought I,
hastening back after her to restore the book, and when I came up to her
she was--not red this time, but wan to the very lips, and otherwise in
such confusion that she seemed to tremble upon her legs, “I think this
is yours, Isobel,” says I: we were too well acquaint from childhood for
any address more formal.

“Oh, thank you, Paul,” said she hastily. “How stupid of me to lose it!”
 She took it from me; her eye fell (for the first time, I felt sure) upon
the title of the volume, and she bit her lip in a vexation. I was all
the more convinced that her book was but a blind in her rambles, and
that there was a lover somewhere; and I think I must have relaxed my
silly black frown a little, and my proud melancholy permitted a faint
smile of amusement. The flag came to her face then.

“Thank you,” said she very dryly, and she left me in the middle of the
road, like a stirk. If it had been no more than that, I should have
thought it a girl's tantrum; but the wonder was to come, for before
I had taken three steps on my resumed way I heard her run after me. I
stopped, and she stopped, and the notion struck me like a rhyme of song
that there was something inexpressibly pleasant in her panting breath
and her heaving bosom, where a pebble brooch of shining red gleamed like
an eye between her breasts.

“I'm not going to tell you a lie about it, Master Paul,” she said,
almost like to cry; “I let the book fall on purpose.”

“Oh, I could have guessed as much as that, Isobel,” said I, wondering
who in all the world the fellow was. Her sun-bonnet had fallen from her
head in her running, and hung at her back on its pink ribbons, and a
curl or two of her hair played truant upon her cheek and temple. It
seemed to me the young gentleman she was willing to let a book drop for
as a signal of her whereabouts was lucky enough.

“Oh! you could have guessed!” she repeated, with a tone in which were
dumbfounderment and annoyance; “then I might have saved myself the
trouble.” And off she went again, leaving me more the stirk than ever
and greatly struck at her remorse of conscience over a little sophistry
very pardonable in a lass caught gallivanting. When she was gone and her
frock was fluttering pink at the turn of the road, I was seized for the
first time with a notion that a girl like that some way set off, as we
say, or suited with, a fine landscape.

Not five minutes later I met young David Borland of the Driepps, and
there--I told myself--the lover was revealed! He let on he was taking
a short cut for Polnoon, so I said neither buff nor sty as to Mistress
Isobel.

The cool superiority of the gentleman, who had, to tell the truth, as
little in his head as I had in the heel of my shoe, somewhat galled me,
for it cried “Spoiled Horn!” as loud as if the taunt were bawled, so my
talk with him was short. There was but one topic in it to interest me.

“Has the man with the scarred brow come yet?” he asked curiously.

I did not understand.

“Then he's not your length yet,” said he, with the manifest gratification
of one who has the hanselling of great news. “Oh! I came on him this
morning outside a tavern in the Gorbals, bargaining loudly about a
saddle horse for Hazel Den. I'll warrant Hazel Den will get a start when
it sees him.”

I did not care to show young Borland much curiosity in his story, and so
it was just in the few words he gave it to me that I brought it home to
our supper-table.

My father and mother looked at each other as if I had told them a
tragedy. The supper ended abruptly. The evening worship passed unusually
fast, my father reading the Book as one in a dream, and we went to our
beds nigh an hour before the customary time.




CHAPTER III

OF THE COMING OF UNCLE ANDREW WITH A SCARRED FOREHEAD AND A BRASS-BOUND
CHEST, AND HOW I TOOK AN INFECTION

It was a night--as often happens in the uplands of our shire in autumn
weather--of vast and brooding darkness: the world seemed to swound in
a breathless oven, and I had scarcely come to my chamber when thunder
broke wild upon the world and torrential rain began to fall. I did not
go to bed, but sat with my candle extinguished and watched the lightning
show the landscape as if it had been flooded by the gleam of moon and
star.

Between the roar of the thunder and the blatter of the rain there were
intervals of an astounding stillness of an ominous suspense, and it
seemed oddly to me, as I sat in my room, that more than I was awake in
Hazel Den House. I felt sure my father and mother sat in their
room, still clad and whispering; it was but the illusion of a
moment--something felt by the instinct and not by reason--and then a
louder, nearer peal of thunder dispelled the notion, and I made to go to
bed.

I stopped like one shot, with my waistcoat half undone.

There was a sound of a horse's hoofs coming up the loan, with the beat
of them in mire sounding soft enough to make me shiver at the notion of
the rider's discomfort in that appalling night, and every now and then
the metal click of shoes, showing the animal over-reached himself in the
trot.

The rider drew up at the front; a flash of the lightning and the wildest
thunder-peal of the night seemed to meet among our outhouses, and when
the roll of the thunder ceased I heard a violent rapping at the outer
door.

The servants would be long ere they let this late visitor out of the
storm, I fancied, and I hurried down; but my father was there in the
hall before me, all dressed, as my curious intuition had informed me,
and his face strange and inscrutable in the light of a shaded candle.
He was making to open the door. My appearance seemed to startle him. He
paused, dubious and a trifle confused.

“I thought you had been in bed long ago,” said he, “and--”

His sentence was not finished, for the horseman broke in upon it with a
masterful rataplan upon the oak, seemingly with a whip-head or a pistol
butt, and a cry, new to my ear and uncanny, rose through the beating
rain.

With a sigh the most distressing I can mind of, my father seemed to
reconcile himself to some fate he would have warded off if he could. He
unbolted and threw back the door.

Our visitor threw himself in upon us as if we held the keys of
paradise--a man like a rake for lankiness, as was manifest even through
the dripping wrap-rascal that he wore; bearded cheek and chin in a
fashion that must seem fiendish in our shaven country; with a wild and
angry eye, the Greig mole black on his temple, and an old scar livid
across his sunburned brow. He threw a three-cocked hat upon the floor
with a gesture of indolent possession.

“Well, I'm damned!” cried he, “but this is a black welcome to one's
poor brother Andy,” and scarcely looked upon my father standing with
the shaded candle in the wind. “What's to drink? Drink, do you hear that
Quentin? Drink--drink--d-r-i-n-k. A long strong drink too, and that's
telling you, and none of the whey that I'm hearing's running through
the Greigs now, that once was a reputable family of three bottles and a
rummer to top all.”

“Whist, whist, man!” pleaded father tremulously, all the man out of him
as he stood before this drunken apparition.

“Whist I quo' he. Well stap me! do you no' ken the lean pup of the
litter?” hiccoughed our visitor, with a sort of sneer that made the
blood run to my head, and for the first time I felt the great, the
splendid joy of a good cause to fight for.

“You're Andrew,” said my father simply, putting his hand upon the man's
coat sleeve in a sympathy for his drenchen clothes.

That kindly hand was jerked off rudely, an act as insolent as if he had
smitten his host upon the mouth: my heart leaped, and my fingers went at
his throat. I could have spread him out against the wall, though I knew
him now my uncle; I could have given him the rogue's quittance with a
black face and a protruding tongue. The candle fell from my father's
hand; the glass shade shattered; the hall of Hazel Den House was plunged
in darkness, and the rain drave in through the open door upon us three
struggling.

“Let him go, Paul,” whispered my father, who I knew was in terror of
frightening his wife, and he wrestled mightily with an arm of each of
us.

Yet I could not let my uncle go, for with the other arm he held a knife,
and he would perhaps have died for it had not another light come on the
stair and my mother's voice risen in a pitiful cry.

We fell asunder on a common impulse, and the drunken wanderer was the
first to speak.

“Katrine,” said he; “it's always the old tale with Andy, you see;
they must be misunderstanding me,” and he bowed with a surprising
gentlemanliness that could have made me almost think him not the man
who had fouled our house with oaths and drawn a knife upon us in the
darkness. The blade of the same, by a trick of legerdemain, had gone up
the sleeve of his dripping coat. He seemed all at once sobered. He took
my good mother by the hand as she stood trembling and never to know
clearly upon what elements of murder she had come.

“It is you, Andrew,” said she, bravely smiling. “What a night to come
home in after twenty years! I'm wae to see you in such a plight. And
your horse?” said she again, lifting her candle and peering into the
darkness of the night. “I must cry up Sandy to stable your horse.”

I'll give my uncle the credit of a confusion at his own forgetfulness.

“Good Lord! Katrine,” said he, “if I did not clean forget the brute, a
fiddle-faced, spavined, spatter-dasher of a Gorbals mare, no' worth her
corn; but there's my bit kistie on her hump.”

The servant was round soon at the stabling of the mare, and my mother
was brewing something of what the gentleman had had too much already,
though she could not guess that; and out of the dripping night he
dragged in none of a rider's customary holsters but a little brass-bound
chest.

“Yon night I set out for my fortune, Quentin,” said he, “I did not think
I would come back with it a bulk so small as this; did you? It was the
sight of the quiet house and the thought of all it contained that made
me act like an idiot as I came in. Still, we must just take the world as
we get it, Quentin; and I knew I was sure of a warm welcome in the old
house, from one side of it if not from the other, for the sake of lang
syne. And this is your son, is it?” he went on, looking at my six feet
of indignation not yet dead “Split me if there's whey in that piece! You
near jammed my hawze that time! Your Uncle Andrew's hawze, boy. Are you
not ashamed of yourself?”

“Not a bit,” said I between my teeth; “I leave that to you.”

He smiled till his teeth shone white in his black beard, and “Lord!”
 cried he, “I'm that glad I came. It was but the toss of a bawbee, when I
came to Leith last week, whether I should have a try at the old doocot,
or up Blue Peter again and off to the Indies. I hate ceiled rooms--they
mind me of the tomb; I'm out of practice at sitting doing nothing in
a parlour and saying grace before meat, and--I give you warning,
Quentin--I'll be damned if I drink milk for supper. It was the notion
of milk for supper and all that means that kept me from calling on
Katrine--and you--any sooner. But I'm glad I came to meet a lad of
spirit like young Andy here.”

“Not Andy,” said my father. “Paul is his name.”

My uncle laughed.

“That was ill done of you, Quentin,” said he; “I think it was as little
as Katrine and you could do to have kept up the family name. I suppose
you reckoned to change the family fate when you made him Paul. H'm! You
must have forgotten that Paul the Apostle wandered most, and many ways
fared worst of all the rest. I haven't forgotten my Bible, you see,
Quentin.”

We were now in the parlour room; a servant lass was puffing up a
new-lighted fire; my uncle, with his head in the shade, had his
greatcoat off, and stood revealed in shabby garments that had once been
most genteel; and his brass-bound fortune, that he seemed averse from
parting with a moment, was at his feet. Getting no answer to what he had
said of the disciples, he looked from one to the other of us and laughed
slyly.

“Take off your boots, Andy,” said my father.

“And where have you been since--since--the Plantations?”

“Stow that, Quentin!” cried my uncle, with an oath and his eye on me.
“What Plantations are you blethering about? And where have I been? Ask
me rather where have I not been. It makes me dizzy even to think of it:
with rotten Jesuits and Pagan gentlemen; with France and Spain, and
with filthy Lascars, lying Greeks, Eboe slaves, stinking niggers, and
slit-eyed Chinese! Oh! I tell you I've seen things in twenty years. And
places, too: this Scotland, with its infernal rain and its grey fields
and its rags, looks like a nightmare to me yet. You may be sure I'll be
out of it pretty fast again.”

“Poor Scotland!” said father ambiguously.

There must be people in the world who are oddly affected by the names
of places, peoples, things that have never come within their own
experience. Till this day the name of Barbadoes influences me like a
story of adventure; and when my Uncle Andrew--lank, bearded, drenched
with storm, stood in our parlour glibly hinting at illimitable travel,
I lost my anger with the tipsy wretch and felt a curious glow go through
my being.




CHAPTER IV

I COME UPON THE RED SHOES

Uncle Andrew settled for the remainder of his time into our domestic
world at Hazel Den as if his place had been kept warm for him since ever
he went away. For the remainder of his time, I say, because he was to be
in the clods of Mearns kirkyard before the hips and haws were off the
hedges; and I think I someway saw his doom in his ghastly countenance
the first morning he sat at our breakfast table, contrite over his folly
of the night before, as you could see, but carrying off the situation
with worldly _sang froid_, and even showing signs of some affection for
my father.

His character may be put in two words--he was a lovable rogue; his
tipsy bitterness to the goodman his brother may be explained almost
as briefly: he had had a notion of Katrine Oliver, and had courted her
before ever she met my father, and he had lost her affection through
his own folly. Judging from what I would have felt myself in the like
circumstances, his bitterest punishment for a life ill spent must have
been to see Katrine Oliver's pitying kindness to him now, and the sight
of that douce and loving couple finding their happiness in each other
must have been a constant sermon to him upon repentance.

Yet, to tell the truth, I fear my Uncle Andrew was not constituted
for repentance or remorse. He had slain a man honestly once, and had
suffered the Plantations, but beyond that (and even that included, as
he must ever insist) he had been guilty of no mean act in all his roving
career. Follies--vices--extremes--ay, a thousand of them; but for most
his conscience never pricked him. On the contrary, he would narrate with
gusto the manifold jeopardies his own follies brought him into; his
wan face, nigh the colour of a shroud, would flush, and his eyes dance
humorously as he shocked the table when we sat at meals, our spoons
suspended in the agitation created by his wonderful histories.

Kept to a moderation with the bottle, and with the constant influence of
my mother, who used to feed the rogue on vegetables and, unknown to him,
load his broth with simples as a cure for his craving, Uncle Andrew was,
all things considered, an acquisition to Hazel Den House. Speaking for
myself, he brought the element of the unusual and the unexpected to a
place where routine had made me sick of my own society; and though
the man in his sober senses knew he was dying on his feet, he was the
cheeriest person of our company sequestered so remote in the moors. It
was a lesson in resignation to see yon merry eyes loweing like lamps
over his tombstone cheeks, and hear him crack a joke in the flushed and
heaving interludes of his cough.

It was to me he ever directed the most sensational of his extraordinary
memorials. My father did not like it; I saw it in his eye. It was
apparent to me that a remonstrance often hung on the tip of his tongue.
He would invent ridiculous and unnecessary tasks to keep me out of
reach of that alluring _raconteur_, and nobody saw it plainer than Uncle
Andrew, who but laughed with the mischievousness of a boy.

Well, the long and short of it was just what Quentin Greig feared--the
Spoiled Horn finally smit with a hunger for the road of the Greigs.
For three hundred years--we could go no further back, because of a bend
sinister--nine out of ten of that family had travelled that road, that
leads so often to a kistful of sailor's shells and a death with boots
on. It was a fate in the blood, like the black hair of us, the mole on
the temple, and the trick of irony. It was that ailment my father
had feared for me; it was that kept the household silent upon missing
brothers (they were dead, my uncle told me, in Trincomalee, and in
Jamaica, and a yard in the Borough of London); it was that inspired the
notion of a lawyer's life for Paul Greig.

Just when I was in the deepmost confidence of Uncle Andrew, who was by
then confined to his bed and suffering the treatment of Doctor Clews,
his stories stopped abruptly and he began to lament the wastry of his
life. If the thing had been better acted I might have been impressed,
for our follies never look just like what they are till we are finally
on the broad of our backs and the Fell Sergeant's step is at the door.
But it was not well acted; and when the wicked Uncle Andrew groaned over
the very ploys he had a week ago exulted in, I recognised some of my
mother's commonest sentiments in his sideways sermon. She had got her
quondam Andy, for lang syne's sake, to help her keep her son at home;
and he was doing his best, poor man, but a trifle late in the day.

“Uncle Andrew,” said I, never heeding his homily, “tell me what came of
the pock-marked tobacco planter when you and the negro lay in the swamp
for him?”

He groaned hopelessly.

“A rotten tale, Paul, my lad,” said he, never looking me in the face; “I
rue the day I was mixed up in that affair.”

“But it was a good story so far as it went, no further gone than
Wednesday last,” I protested.

He laughed at that, and for half an hour he put off the new man of
my mother's bidding, and we were on the old naughty footing again. He
concluded by bequeathing to me for the twentieth time the brass-bound
chest, and its contents that we had never seen nor could guess the
nature of. But now for the first time he let me know what I might expect
there.

“It's not what Quentin might consider much,” said he, “for there's not a
guelder of money in it, no, nor so little as a groat, for as the world's
divided ye can't have both the money and the dance, and I was aye the
fellow for the dance. There's scarcely anything in it, Paul, but the
trash--ahem!--that is the very fitting reward of a life like mine.”

“And still and on, uncle,” said I, “it is a very good tale about the
pock-marked man.”

“Ah! You're there, Greig!” cried the rogue, laughing till his hoast came
to nigh choke him. “Well, the kist's yours, anyway, such as it is; and
there's but one thing in it--to be strict, a pair--that I set any store
by as worth leaving to my nephew.”

“It ought to be spurs,” said I, “to drive me out of this lamentable
countryside and to where a fellow might be doing something worth while.”

“Eh!” he cried, “you're no' so far off it, for it's a pair of shoes.”

“A pair of shoes!” I repeated, half inclined to think that Uncle Andrew
was doited at last.

“A pair of shoes, and perhaps in some need of the cobbler, for I have
worn them a good deal since I got them in Madras. They were not new when
I got them, but by the look of them they're not a day older now. They
have got me out of some unco' plights in different parts of the world,
for all that the man who sold them to me at a bonny penny called them
the Shoes of Sorrow; and so far as I ken, the virtue's in them yet.”

“A doomed man's whim,” thought I, and professed myself vastly gratified
by his gift.

He died next morning. It was Candlemas Day. He went out at last like a
crusie wanting oil. In the morning he had sat up in bed to sup
porridge that, following a practice I had made before his reminiscences
concluded, I had taken in to him myself. Tremendous long and lean the
upper part of him looked, and the cicatrice upon his brow made his
ghastliness the more appalling. When he sat against the bolsters he
could see through the window into the holm field, and, as it happened,
what was there but a wild young roe-deer driven down from some higher
part of the country by stress of winter weather, and a couple of mongrel
dogs keeping him at bay in an angle of the fail dyke.

I have seldom seen a man more vastly moved than Uncle Andrew looking
upon this tragedy of the wilds. He gasped as though his chest would
crack, a sweat burst on his face.

“That's--that's the end o't, Paul, my lad!” said he. “Yonder's your
roving uncle, and the tykes have got him cornered at last. No more the
heather and the brae; no more--no more--no more--”

Such a change came on him that I ran and cried my mother ben, and she
and father were soon at his bedside.

It was to her he turned his eyes, that had seen so much of the spacious
world of men and women and all their multifarious interests, great and
little. They shone with a light of memory and affection, so that I got
there and then a glimpse of the Uncle Andrew of innocence and the Uncle
Andrew who might have been if fate had had it otherwise.

He put out his hand and took hers, and said goodbye.

“The hounds have me, Katrine,” said he. “I'm at the fail dyke corner.”

“I'll go out and whistle them off, uncle,” said I, fancying it all a
doited man's illusion, though the look of death was on him; but I stood
rebuked in the frank gaze he gave me of a fuller comprehension than
mine, though he answered me not.

And then he took my father's hand in his other, and to him too he said
farewell.

“You're there, Quentin!” said he; “and Katrine--Katrine--Katrine chose
by far the better man. God be merciful to poor Andy Greig, a sinner.”
 And these were his last words.




CHAPTER V

A SPOILED TRYST, AND OTHER THINGS THAT FOLLOWED ON THE OPENING OF THE
CHEST

The funeral was over before I cared to examine my bequest, and then I
went to it with some reluctance, for if a pair of shoes was the chief
contents of the brass-bound chest, there was like to be little else
except the melancholy relics of a botched life. It lay where he left it
on the night he came--under the foot of his bed--and when I lifted the
lid I felt as if I was spying upon a man through a keyhole. Yet, when I
came more minutely to examine the contents, I was disappointed that at
the first reflection nothing was there half so pregnant as his own most
casual tale to rouse in me the pleasant excitation of romance.

A bairn's caul--that sailor's trophy that has kept many a mariner
from drowning only that he might die a less pleasant death; a broken
handcuff, whose meaning I cared not to guess at; a pop or pistol; a
chap-book of country ballads, that possibly solaced his exile from
the land they were mostly written about; the batters of a Bible, with
nothing between them but his name in his mother's hand on the inside of
the board; a traveller's log or itinerary, covering a period of fifteen
years, extremely minute in its detail and well written; a broken
sixpence and the pair of shoes.

The broken sixpence moved my mother to tears, for she had had the other
half twenty years ago, before Andrew Greig grew ne'er-do-weel; the shoes
failed to rouse in her or in my father any interest whatever. If they
could have guessed it, they would have taken them there and then and
sunk them in the deepest linn of Earn.

There was little kenspeckle about them saving their colour, which was
a dull dark red. They were of the most excellent material, with a great
deal of fine sewing thrown away upon them in parts where it seems to
me their endurance was in no wise benefited, and an odd pair of silver
buckles gave at your second glance a foreign look to them.

I put them on at the first opportunity: they fitted me as if my feet had
been moulded to them, and I sat down to the study of the log-book. The
afternoon passed, the dusk came. I lit a candle, and at midnight, when I
reached the year of my uncle's escape from the Jesuits of Spain, I came
to myself gasping, to find the house in an alarm, and that lanthorns
were out about Earn Water looking for me, while all the time I was
_perdu_ in the dead uncle's chamber in the baron's wing, as we called
it, of Hazel Den House. I pretended I had fallen asleep; it was the
first and the last time I lied to my mother, and something told me she
knew I was deceiving her. She looked at the red shoes on my feet.

“Ugly brogues!” said she; “it's a wonder to me you would put them on
your feet. You don't know who has worn them.”

“They were Uncle Andy's,” said I, complacently looking at them, for they
fitted like a glove; the colour was hardly noticeable in the evening,
and the buckles were most becoming.

“Ay! and many a one before him, I'm sure,” said she, with distaste in
her tone, “I don't think them nice at all, Paul,” and she shuddered a
little.

“That's but a freit,” said I; “but it's not likely I'll wear much of
such a legacy.” I went up and left them in the chest, and took the diary
into my own room and read Uncle Andrew's marvellous adventures in the
trade of rover till it was broad daylight.

When I had come to the conclusion it seemed as if I had been in the
delirium of a fever, so tempestuous and unreal was that memoir of a wild
loose life. The sea was there, buffeting among the pages in rollers and
breakers; there were the chronicles of a hundred ports, with boozing
kens and raving lazarettos in them; far out isles and cays in nameless
oceans, and dozing lagoons below tropic skies; a great clash of weapons
and a bewildering deal of political intrigue in every part of the
Continent from Calais to Constantinople. My uncle's narrative in life
had not hinted at one half the marvel of his career, and I read his
pages with a rapture, as one hears a noble piece of music, fascinated to
the uttermost, and finding no moral at the end beyond that the world
we most of us live in with innocence and ignorance is a crust over
tremendous depths. And then I burned the book. It went up in a grey
smoke on the top of the fire that I had kept going all night for its
perusal; and the thing was no sooner done than I regretted it, though
the act was dictated by the seemly enough idea that its contents would
only distress my parents if they came to their knowledge.

For days--for weeks--for a season--I went about, my head humming with
Uncle Andy's voice recounting the most stirring of his adventures as
narrated in the log-book. I had been infected by almost his first words
the night he came to Hazel Den House, and made a magic chant of the mere
names of foreign peoples; now I was fevered indeed; and when I put on
the red shoes (as I did of an evening, impelled by some dandyism foreign
to my nature hitherto), they were like the seven-league boots for magic,
as they set my imagination into every harbour Uncle Andy had frequented
and made me a guest at every inn where he had met his boon companions.

I was wearing them the next time I went on my excursion to Earn side and
there met Isobel Fortune, who had kept away from the place since I had
smiled at my discovery of her tryst with Hervey's “Meditations.” She
came upon me unexpectedly, when the gentility of my shoes and the
recollection of all that they had borne of manliness was making me walk
along the road with a very high head and an unusually jaunty step.

She seemed struck as she came near, with her face displaying her
confusion, and it seemed to me she was a new woman altogether--at least,
not the Isobel I had been at school with and seen with an indifferent
eye grow up like myself from pinafores. It seemed suddenly scandalous
that the like of her should have any correspondence with so ill-suited a
lover as David Borland of the Dreipps.

For the first time (except for the unhappy introduction of Hervey's
“Meditations”) we stopped to speak to each other. She was the most
bewitching mixture of smiles and blushes, and stammering now and then,
and vastly eager to be pleasant to me, and thinks I, “My lass, you're
keen on trysting when it's with Borland.”

The very thought of the fellow in that connection made me angry in her
interest; and with a mischievous intention of spoiling his sport if he
hovered, as I fancied, in the neighbourhood, or at least of delaying his
happiness as long as I could, I kept the conversation going very blithe
indeed.

She had a laugh, low and brief, and above all sincere, which is the
great thing in laughter, that was more pleasant to hear than the sound
of Earn in its tinkling hollow among the ferns: it surprised me that she
should favour my studied and stupid jocosities with it so frequently.
Here was appreciation! I took, in twenty minutes, a better conceit of
myself, than the folks at home could have given me in the twelve
months since I left the college, and I'll swear to this date 'twas the
consciousness of my fancy shoes that put me in such good key.

She saw my glance to them at last complacently, and pretended herself to
notice them for the first time.

She smiled--little hollows came near the corners of her lips; of
a sudden I minded having once kissed Mistress Grant's niece in a
stair-head frolic in Glasgow High Street, and the experience had been
pleasant enough.

“They're very nice,” said Isobel.

“They're all that,” said I, gazing boldly at her dimples. She flushed
and drew in her lips.

“No, no!” I cried, “'twas not them I was thinking of; but their
neighbours. I never saw you had dimples before.”

At that she was redder than ever.

“I could not help that, Paul,” said she; “they have been always there,
and you are getting very audacious. I was thinking of your new shoes.”

“How do you know they're new?”

“I could tell,” said she, “by the sound of your footstep before you came
in sight.”

“It might not have been my footstep,” said I, and at that she was taken
back.

“That is true,” said she, hasty to correct herself. “I only thought it
might be your footstep, as you are often this way.”

“It might as readily have been David Borland's. I have seen him about
here.” I watched her as closely as I dared: had her face changed, I
would have felt it like a blow.

“Anyway, they're very nice, your new shoes,” said she, with a marvellous
composure that betrayed nothing.

“They were uncle's legacy,” I explained, “and had travelled far in many
ways about the world; far--and fast.”

“And still they don't seem to be in such a hurry as your old ones,” said
she, with a mischievous air. Then she hastened to cover what might seem
a rudeness. “Indeed, they're very handsome, Paul, and become you very
much, and--and--and--”

“They're called the Shoes of Sorrow; that's the name my uncle had for
them,” said I, to help her to her own relief.

“Indeed, and I hope it may be no more than a by-name,” she said gravely.

The day had the first rumour of spring: green shoots thrust among the
bare bushes on the river side, and the smell of new turned soil came
from a field where a plough had been feiring; above us the sky was blue,
in the north the land was pleasantly curved against silver clouds.

And one small bird began to pipe in a clump of willows, that showered a
dust of gold upon us when the little breeze came among the branches. I
looked at all and I looked at Isobel Fortune, so trim and bonny, and it
seemed there and then good to be a man and my fortunes all to try.

“Sorrow here or sorrow there, Isobel,” I said, “they are the shoes to
take me away sooner or later from Hazel Den.”

She caught my meaning with astounding quickness.

“Are you in earnest?” she asked soberly, and I thought she could not
have been more vexed had it been David Borland.

“Another year of this.” said I, looking at the vacant land, “would break
my heart.”

“Indeed, Paul, and I thought Earn-side was never so sweet as now,” said
she, vexed like, as if she was defending a companion.

“That is true, too,” said I, smiling into the very depths of her large
dark eyes, where I saw a pair of Spoiled Horns as plainly as if I looked
in sunny weather into Linn of Earn. “That is true, too. I have never
been better pleased with it than to-day. But what in the world's to
keep me? It's all bye with the college--at which I'm but middling well
pleased; it's all bye with the law--for which thanks to Heaven! and,
though they seem to think otherwise at Hazel Den House, I don't believe
I've the cut of a man to spend his life among rowting cattle and dour
clay land.”

“I daresay not; it's true,” said she stammeringly, with one fast glance
that saw me from the buckles of my red shoes to the underlids of my
eyes. For some reason or other she refused to look higher, and the
distant landscape seemed to have charmed her after that. She drummed
with a toe upon the path; she bit her nether lip; upon my word, the lass
had tears at her eyes! I had, plainly, kept her long enough from her
lover. “Well, it's a fine evening; I must be going,” said I stupidly,
making a show at parting, and an ugly sense of annoyance with David
Borland stirring in my heart. “But it will rain before morning,” said
she, making to go too, but always looking to the hump of Dungoyne that
bars the way to the Hielands. “I think, after all, Master Paul, I liked
the old shoon better than the new ones.”

“Do you say so?” I asked, astonished at the irrelevance that came
rapidly from her lips, as if she must cry it out or choke. “And how
comes that?”

“Just because--” said she, and never a word more, like a woman, nor fair
good-e'en nor fair good-day to ye, but off she went, and I was the stirk
again.

I looked after her till she went out of sight, wondering what had been
the cause of her tirravee. She fair ran at the last, as if eager to get
out of my sight; and when she disappeared over the brae that rose from
the river-side there was a sense of deprivation within me. I was clean
gone in love and over the lugs in it with Isobel Fortune.




CHAPTER VI

MY DEED ON THE MOOR OF MEARNS


Next day I shot David Borland of the Driepps.

It was the seventh of March, the first day I heard the laverock that
season, and it sang like to burst its heart above the spot where the
lad fell with a cry among the rushes. It rose from somewhere in our
neighbourhood, aspiring to the heavens, but chained to earth by its
own song; and even yet I can recall the eerie influence of that strange
conjunction of sin and song as I stood knee-deep in the tangle of the
moor with the pistol smoking in my hand.

To go up to the victim of my jealousy as he lay ungainly on the ground,
his writhing over, was an ordeal I could not face.

“Davie, Davie!” I cried to him over the thirty paces; but I got no reply
from yon among the rushes. I tried to wet my cracking lips with a tongue
like a cork, and “Davie, oh, Davie, are ye badly hurt?” I cried, in a
voice I must have borrowed from ancient time when my forefathers fought
with the forest terrors.

I listened and I better listened, but Borland still lay there at last, a
thing insensate like a gangrel's pack, and in all the dreary land there
was nothing living but the laverock and me.

The bird was high--a spot upon the blue; his song, I am sure, was the
song of his kind, that has charmed lovers in summer fields from old
time--a melody rapturous, a message like the message of the evening
star that God no more fondly loves than that small warbler in desert
places--and yet there and then it deaved me like a cry from hell. No
heavenly message had the lark for me: he flew aloft there into the
invisible, to tell of this deed of mine among the rushes. Not God alone
would hear him tell his story: they might hear it, I knew, in shepherds'
cots; they might hear it in an old house bowered dark among trees; the
solitary witness of my crime might spread the hue and cry about the
shire; already the law might be on the road for young Paul Greig.

I seemed to listen a thousand years to that telltale in the air; for a
thousand years I scanned the blue for him in vain, yet when I looked at
my pistol again the barrel was still warm.

It was the first time I had handled such a weapon.

A senseless tool it seemed, and yet the crooking of a finger made it
the confederate of hate; though it, with its duty done, relapsed into a
heedless silence, I, that owned it for my instrument, must be wailing in
my breast, torn head to foot with thunders of remorse.

I raised the hammer, ran a thumb along the flint, seeing something
fiendish in the jaws that held it; I lifted up the prime-cap, and it
seemed some miracle of Satan that the dust I had put there in the peace
of my room that morning in Hazel Den should have disappeared. “Truefitt”
 on the lock; a silver shield and an initial graven on it; a butt with a
dragon's grin that had seemed ridiculous before, and now seemed to cry
“Cain!” Lord! that an instrument like this in an unpractised hand should
cut off all young Borland's earthly task, end his toil with plough and
harrow, his laugh and story.

I looked again at the shapeless thing at thirty paces. “It cannot be,”
 I told myself; and I cried again, in the Scots that must make him cease
his joke, “I ken ye're only lettin' on, Davie. Get up oot o' that and
we'll cry quits.”

But there was no movement; there was no sound; the tell-tale had the
heavens to himself.

All the poltroon in me came a-top and dragged my better man round about,
let fall the pistol from my nerveless fingers and drove me away from
that place. It was not the gallows I thought of (though that too was
sometimes in my mind), but of the frightful responsibility I had made my
burden, to send a human man before his Maker without a preparation, and
my bullet hole upon his brow or breast, to tell for ever through the
roaring ring of all eternity that this was the work of Paul Greig. The
rushes of the moor hissed me as I ran blindly through them; the tufts of
heather over Whiggit Knowe caught at me to stop me; the laverock seemed
to follow overhead, a sergeant of provost determined on his victim.

My feet took me, not home to the home that was mine no more, but to
Earn-side, where I felt the water crying in its linn would drown the
sound of the noisy laverock; and the familiar scene would blot for a
space the ugly sight from my eyes. I leant at the side to lave my brow,
and could scarce believe that this haggard countenance I saw look up at
me from the innocent waters was the Spoiled Horn who had been reflected
in Isobel's eyes. Over and over again I wet my lips and bathed my
temples; I washed my hands, and there was on the right forefinger a mark
I bear to this day where the trigger guard of the pistol in the moments
of my agony had cut me to the bone without my knowing it.

When my face looked less like clay and my plans were clear, I rose and
went home.

My father and mother were just sitting to supper, and I joined them.
They talked of a cousin to be married in Drymen at Michaelmas, of an
income in the leg of our mare, of Sabbath's sermon, of things that were
as far from me as I from heaven, and I heard them as one in a dream,
far-off. What I was hearing most of the time was the laverock setting
the hue and cry of Paul Greig's crime around the world and up to the
Throne itself, and what I was seeing was the vacant moor, now in the
dusk, and a lad's remains awaiting their discovery. The victuals choked
me as I pretended to eat; my father noticed nothing, my mother gave a
glance, and a fright was in her face.

I went up to my room and searched a desk for some verses that had been
gathering there in my twelve months' degradation, and particularly for
one no more than a day old with Isobel Fortune for its theme. It was
all bye with that! I was bound to be glancing at some of the lines as
I furiously tore them up and threw them out of the window into the
bleaching-green; and oh! but the black sorrows and glooms that were
there recorded seemed a mockery in the light of this my terrible
experience. They went by the window, every scrap: then I felt cut off
from every innocent day of my youth, the past clean gone from me for
ever.

The evening worship came.

_“If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost ends of
the sea.”_

My father, peering close at the Book through his spectacles, gave out
the words as if he stood upon a pulpit, deliberate--too deliberate for
Cain his son, that sat with his back to the window shading his face from
a mother's eyes. They were always on me, her eyes, throughout that last
service; they searched me like a torch in a pit, and wae, wae was her
face!

When we came to pray and knelt upon the floor, I felt as through my shut
eyes that hers were on me even then, exceeding sad and troubled. They
followed me like that when I went up, as they were to think, to my bed,
and I was sitting at my window in the dark half an hour later when
she came up after me. She had never done the like before since I was a
child.

“Are ye bedded, Paul?” she whispered in the dark.

I could not answer her in words, but I stood to my feet and lit a
candle, and she saw that I was dressed.

“What ails ye to-night?” she asked trembling. “I'm going away, mother,” I
answered. “There's something wrong?” she queried in great distress.

“There's all that!” I confessed. “It'll be time for you to ken about
that in the morning, but I must be off this night.”

“Oh, Paul, Paul!” she cried, “I did not like to see you going out in
these shoes this afternoon, and I ken't that something ailed ye.”

“The road to hell suits one shoe as well's another,” said I bitterly;
“where the sorrow lies is that ye never saw me go out with a different
heart. Mother, mother, the worst ye can guess is no' so bad as the worst
ye've yet to hear of your son.”

I was in a storm of roaring emotions, yet her next words startled me.

“It's Isobel Fortune of the Kirkillstane,” she said, trying hard to
smile with a wan face in the candle light.

“It _was_--poor dear! Am I not in torment when I think that she must
know it?”

“I thought it was that that ailed ye, Paul,” said she, as if she were
relieved. “Look; I got this a little ago on the bleaching-green--this
scrap of paper in your write and her name upon it. Maybe I should not
have read it.” And she handed me part of that ardent ballad I had torn
less than an hour ago.

I held it in the flame of her candle till it was gone, our hands all
trembling, and “That's the end appointed for Paul Greig,” said I.

“Oh, Paul, Paul, it cannot be so unco'!” she cried in terror, and
clutched me at the arm.

“It is--it is the worst.”

“And yet--and yet--you're my son, Paul. Tell me.”

She looked so like a reed in the winter wind, so frail and little and
shivering in my room, that I dared not tell her there and then. I said
it was better that both father and she should hear my tale together, and
we went into the room where already he was bedded but not asleep. He sat
up staring at our entry, a night-cowl tassel dangling on his brow.

“There's a man dead--” I began, when he checked me with a shout.

“Stop, stop!” he cried, and put my mother in a chair. “I have heard the
tale before with my brother Andy, and the end was not for women's ears.”

“I must know, Quentin,” said his wife, blanched to the lip but
determined, and then he put his arm about her waist. It seemed like a
second murder to wrench those tender hearts that loved me, but the thing
was bound to do.

I poured out my tale at one breath and in one sentence, and when it
ended my mother was in her swound.

“Oh, Paul!” cried the poor man, his face like a clout; “black was the
day she gave you birth!”




CHAPTER VII

QUENTIN GREIG LOSES A SON, AND I SET OUT WITH A HORSE AS ALL MY FORTUNE

He pushed me from the chamber as I had been a stranger intruding, and I
went to the trance door and looked out at the stretching moorlands lit
by an enormous moon that rose over Cathkin Braes, and an immensity of
stars. For the first time in all my life I realised the heedlessness of
nature in human affairs the most momentous. For the moon swung up serene
beyond expression; the stars winked merrily: a late bird glid among the
bushes and perched momentarily on a bough of ash to pipe briefly almost
with the passion of the spring. But not the heedlessness of nature
influenced me so much as the barren prospect of the world that the moon
and stars revealed. There was no one out there in those deep spaces of
darkness I could claim as friend or familiar. Where was I to go? What
was I to do? Only the beginnings of schemes came to me--schemes
of concealment and disguise, of surrender even--but the last to be
dismissed as soon as it occurred to me, for how could I leave this house
the bitter bequest of a memory of the gallows-tree?

Only the beginnings, I say, for every scheme ran tilt against the
obvious truth that I was not only without affection or regard out there,
but without as much as a crown of money to purchase the semblance of
either.

I could not have stood very long there when my father came out, his face
like clay, and aged miraculously, and beckoned me to the parlour.

“Your mother--my wife,” said he, “is very ill, and I am sending for the
doctor. The horse is yoking. There is another woman in Driepps who--God
help her!--will be no better this night, but I wish in truth her case
was ours, and that it was you who lay among the heather.”

He began pacing up and down the floor, his eyes bent, his hands
continually wringing, his heart bursting, as it were, with sighs and the
dry sobs of the utmost wretchedness. As for me, I must have been clean
gyte (as the saying goes), for my attention was mostly taken up with the
tassel of his nightcap that bobbed grotesquely on his brow. I had not
seen it since, as a child, I used to share his room.

“What! what!” he cried at last piteously, “have ye never a word to say?
Are ye dumb?” He ran at me and caught me by the collar of the coat and
tried to shake me in an anger, but I felt it no more than I had been a
stone.

“What did ye do it for? What in heaven's name did ye quarrel on?”

“It was--it was about a girl,” I said, reddening even at that momentous
hour to speak of such a thing to him.

“A girl!” he repeated, tossing up his hands. “Keep us! Hoo lang are ye
oot o' daidlies? Well! well!” he went on, subduing himself and prepared
to listen. I wished the tassel had been any other colour than crimson,
and hung fairer on the middle of his forehead; it seemed to fascinate
me. And he, belike, forgot that I was there, for he thought, I knew,
continually of his wife, and he would stop his feverish pacing on the
floor, and hearken for a sound from the room where she was quartered
with the maid. I made no answer.

“Well, well!” he cried again fiercely, turning upon me. “Out with it;
out with the whole hellish transaction, man!”

And then I told him in detail what before my mother I had told in a
brief abstract.

How that I had met young Borland coming down the breast of the brae at
Kirkillstane last night and--

“Last night!” he cried. “Are ye havering? I saw ye go to your bed at
ten, and your boots were in the kitchen.”

It was so, I confessed. I had gone to my room but not to bed, and had
slipped out by the window when the house was still, with Uncle Andrew's
shoes.

“Oh, lad!” he cried, “it's Andy's shoes you stand in sure enough, for
I have seen him twenty years syne in the plight that you are in this
night. Merciful heaven! what dark blotch is in the history of this
family of ours that it must ever be embroiled in crimes of passion and
come continually to broken ends of fortune? I have lived stark honest
and humble, fearing the Lord; the covenants have I kept, and still and
on it seems I must beget a child of the Evil One!”

And how, going out thus under cover of night, I had meant to indulge a
boyish fancy by seeing the light of Isobel Fortune's window. And how,
coming to the Kirkillstane, I met David Borland leaving the house,
whistling cheerfully.

“Oh, Paul, Paul!” cried my father, “I mind of you an infant on her knees
that's ben there, and it might have been but yesterday your greeting in
the night wakened me to mourn and ponder on your fate.” And how Borland,
divining my object there, and himself new out triumphant from that
cheerful house of many daughters, made his contempt for the Spoiled Horn
too apparent.

“You walked to the trough-stane when you were a twelvemonth old,” said
my father with the irrelevance of great grief, as if he recalled a dead
son's infancy.

And how, maddened by some irony of mine, he had struck a blow upon
my chest, and so brought my challenge to something more serious and
gentlemanly than a squalid brawl with fists upon the highway.

I stopped my story; it seemed useless to be telling it to one so much
preoccupied with the thought of the woman he loved. His lips were open,
his eyes were constant on the door.

But “Well! Well!” he cried again eagerly, and I resumed.

Of how I had come home, and crept into my guilty chamber and lay the
long night through, torn by grief and anger, jealousy and distress. And
how evading the others of the household as best I could that day, I
had in the afternoon at the hour appointed gone out with Uncle Andrew's
pistol.

My father moaned--a waefu' sound!

And found young Borland up on the moor before me with such another
weapon, his face red byordinary, his hands and voice trembling with
passion.

“Poor lad, poor lad!” my father cried blurting the sentiment as he had
been a bairn.

How we tossed a coin to decide which should be the first to fire, and
Borland had won the toss, and gone to the other end of our twenty paces
with vulgar menaces and “Spoiled Horn” the sweetest of his epithets.

“Poor lad! he but tried to bluster down the inward voice that told him
the folly o't,” said father.

And how Borland had fired first. The air was damp. The sound was like a
slamming door.

“The door of hope shut up for him, poor dear,” cried father.

And how he missed me in his trepidation that made his hand that held the
pistol so tremble that I saw the muzzle quiver even at twenty paces.

“And then you shot him deliberately I M cried my father.

“No, no,” I cried at that, indignant. “I aimed without a glance along
the barrel: the flint flashed; the prime missed fire, and I was not
sorry, but Borland cried 'Spoiled Horn' braggingly, and I cocked again
as fast as I could, and blindly jerked the trigger. I never thought of
striking him. He fell with one loud cry among the rushes.”

“Murder, by God!” cried my father, and he relapsed into a chair, his
body all convulsed with horror.

I had told him all this as if I had been in a delirium, or as if it were
a tale out of a book, and it was only when I saw him writhing in his
chair and the tassel shaking over his eyes, I minded that the murderer
was me. I made for the door; up rose my father quickly and asked me what
I meant to do.

I confessed I neither knew nor cared.

“You must thole your assize,” said he, and just as he said it the
clatter of the mare's hoofs sounded on the causey of the yard, and he
must have minded suddenly for what object she was saddled there.

“No, no,” said he, “you must flee the country. What right have you to
make it any worse for her?”

“I have not a crown in my pocket,” said I.

“And I have less,” he answered quickly. “Where are you going? No, no,
don't tell me that; I'm not to know. There's the mare saddled, I meant
Sandy to send the doctor from the Mearns, but you can do that. Bid him
come here as fast as he can.”

“And must I come back with the mare?” I asked, reckless what he might
say to that, though my life depended on it.

“For the sake of your mother,” he answered, “I would rather never set
eyes on you or the beast again; she's the last transaction between us,
Paul Greig.” And then he burst in tears, with his arms about my neck.

[Illustration: 067]

Ten minutes later I was on the mare, and galloping, for all her ailing
leg, from Hazel Den as if it were my own loweing conscience. I roused
Dr. Clews at the Mearns, and gave him my father's message. “Man,” said
he, holding his chamber light up to my face, “man, ye're as gash as a
ghaist yersel'.”

“I may well be that,” said I, and off I set, with some of Uncle Andy's
old experience in my mind, upon a ride across broad Scotland.




CHAPTER VIII

I RIDE BY NIGHT ACROSS SCOTLAND, AND MEET A MARINER WITH A GLEED EYE

That night was like the day, with a full moon shining. The next
afternoon I rode into Borrowstounness, my horse done out and myself sore
from head to heel; and never in all my life have I seen a place with a
more unwelcome aspect, for the streets were over the hoof in mud; the
natives directed me in an accent like a tinker's whine; the Firth of
Forth was wrapped in a haar or fog that too closely put me in mind of my
prospects. But I had no right to be too particular, and in the course of
an hour I had sold the mare for five pounds to a man of much Christian
profession, who would not give a farthing more on the plea that she was
likely stolen.

The five pounds and the clothes I stood in were my fortune: it did not
seem very much, if it was to take me out of the reach of the long arm of
the doomster; and thinking of the doomster I minded of the mole upon
my brow, that was the most kenspeckle thing about me in the event of a
description going about the country, so the first thing I bought with
my fortune was a pair of scissors. Going into a pend close in one of the
vennels beside the quay, I clipped off the hair upon the mole and felt a
little safer. I was coming out of the close, pouching the scissors, when
a man of sea-going aspect, with high boots and a tarpaulin hat, stumbled
against me and damned my awkwardness.

“You filthy hog,” said I, exasperated at such manners, for he was
himself to blame for the encounter; “how dare you speak to me like
that?” He was a man of the middle height, sturdy on his bowed legs in
spite of the drink obvious in his face and speech, and he had a roving
gleed black eye. I had never clapped gaze on him in all my life before.

“Is that the way ye speak to Dan Risk, ye swab?” said he, ludicrously
affecting a dignity that ill suited with his hiccough. “What's the good
of me being a skipper if every linen-draper out of Fife can cut into my
quarter on my own deck?”

“This is no' your quarter-deck, man, if ye were sober enough to ken it,”
 said I; “and I'm no linen-draper from Fife or anywhere else.”

And then the brute, with his hands thrust to the depth of his pockets,
staggered me as if he had done it with a blow of his fist.

“No,” said he, with a very cunning tone, “ye're no linen-draper perhaps,
but--ye're maybe no sae decent a man, young Greig.”

It was impossible for me to conceal even from this tipsy rogue my
astonishment and alarm at this. It seemed to me the devil himself must
be leagued against me in the cause of justice. A cold sweat came on my
face and the palms of my hands. I opened my mouth and meant to give him
the lie but I found I dare not do so in the presence of what seemed a
miracle of heaven.

“How do you ken my name's Greig?” I asked at the last.

“Fine that,” he made answer, with a grin; “and there's mony an odd thing
else I ken.”

“Well, it's no matter,” said I, preparing to quit him, but in great fear
of what the upshot might be; “I'm for off, anyway.”

By this time it was obvious that he was not so drunk as I thought him at
first, and that in temper and tact he was my match even with the
glass in him. “Do ye ken what I would be doing if I was you?” said he
seemingly determined not to let me depart like that, for he took a step
or two after me.

I made no reply, but quickened my pace and after me he came, lurching
and catching at my arm; and I mind to this day the roll of him gave me
the impression of a crab.

“If it's money ye want-” I said at the end of my patience.

“Curse your money!” he cried, pretending to spit the insult from his
mouth. “Curse your money; but if I was you, and a weel-kent skipper like
Dan Risk--like Dan Risk of the _Seven Sisters_--made up to me out of a
redeeculous good nature and nothing else, I would gladly go and splice
the rope with him in the nearest ken.”

“Go and drink with yourself, man,” I cried; “there's the money for a
chappin of ate, and I'll forego my share of it.”

I could have done nothing better calculated to infuriate him. As I held
out the coin on the palm of my hand he struck it up with an oath and
it rolled into the syver. His face flamed till the neck of him seemed a
round of seasoned beef.

“By the Rock o' Bass!” he roared, “I would clap ye in jyle for less than
your lousy groat.”

Ah, then, it was in vain I had put the breadth of Scotland between me
and that corpse among the rushes: my heart struggled a moment, and sank
as if it had been drowned in bilge. I turned on the man what must have
been a gallows face, and he laughed, and, gaining his drunken good
nature again he hooked me by the arm, and before my senses were my own
again he was leading me down the street and to the harbour. I had never
a word to say.

The port, as I tell, was swathed in the haar of the east, out of which
tall masts rose dim like phantom spears; the clumsy tarred bulwarks
loomed like walls along the quay, and the neighbourhood was noisy with
voices that seemed unnatural coming out of the haze. Mariners were
hanging about the sheds, and a low tavern belched others out to keep
them company. Risk made for the tavern, and at that I baulked.

“Oh, come on!” said he. “If I'm no' mistaken Dan Risk's the very man
ye're in the need of. You're wanting out of Scotland, are ye no'?”

“More than that; I'm wanting out of myself,” said I, but that seemed
beyond him.

“Come in anyway, and we'll talk it over.”

That he might help me out of the country seemed possible if he was not,
as I feared at first, some agent of the law and merely playing with me,
so I entered the tavern with him.

“Two gills to the coffin-room, Mrs. Clerihew,” he cried to the woman in
the kitchen. “And slippy aboot it, if ye please, for my mate here's been
drinking buttermilk all his life, and ye can tell't in his face.”

“I would rather have some meat,” said I.

“Humph!” quo' he, looking at my breeches. “A lang ride!” He ordered the
food at my mentioning, and made no fuss about drinking my share of the
spirits as well as his own, while I ate with a hunger that was soon
appeased, for my eye, as the saying goes, was iller to satisfy than my
appetite.

He sat on the other side of the table in the little room that doubtless
fairly deserved the name it got of coffin, for many a man, I'm thinking,
was buried there in his evil habits; and I wondered what was to be next.

“To come to the bit,” said the at last, looking hard into the bottom of
his tankard in a way that was a plain invitation to buy more for him.
“To come to the bit, you're wanting out of the country?”

“It's true,” said I; “but how do you know? And how do you know my name,
for I never saw you to my knowledge in all my life before?”

“So much the worse for you; I'm rale weel liked by them that kens me.
What would ye give for a passage to Nova Scotia?”

“It's a long way,” said I, beginning to see a little clearer.

“Ay,” said he, “but I've seen a gey lang rope too, and a man danglin' at
the end of it.”

Again my face betrayed me. I made no answer.

“I ken all aboot it,” he went on. “Your name's Greig; ye're from a
place called the Hazel Den at the other side o' the country; ye've been
sailing wi' a stiff breeze on the quarter all night, and the clime
o' auld Scotland's one that doesna suit your health, eh? What's the
amount?” said he, and he looked towards my pocket “Could we no' mak' it
halfers?”

“Five pounds,” said I, and at that he looked strangely dashed.

“Five pounds,” he repeated incredulously. “It seems to have been hardly
worth the while.” And then his face changed, as if a new thought had
struck him. He leaned over the table and whispered with the infernal
tone of a confederate, “Doused his glim, eh?” winking with his hale eye,
so that I could not but shiver at him, as at the touch of slime.

“I don't understand,” said I.

“Do ye no'?” said he, with a sneer; “for a Greig ye're mighty slow in
the uptak'. The plain English o' that, then, is that ye've killed a man.
A trifle like that ance happened to a Greig afore.”

“What's your name?” I demanded.

“Am I no tellin' ye?” said he shortly. “It's just Daniel Risk; and where
could you get a better? Perhaps ye were thinkin' aboot swappin' names
wi' me; and by the Bass, it's Dan's family name would suit very weel
your present position,” and the scoundrel laughed at his own humour.

“I asked because I was frightened it might be Mahoun,” said I. “It seems
gey hard to have ridden through mire for a night and a day, and land
where ye started from at the beginning. And how do ye ken all that?”

“Oh!” he said, “kennin's my trade, if ye want to know. And whatever way
I ken, ye needna think I'm the fellow to make much of a sang aboot it.
Still and on, the thing's frowned doon on in this country, though in
places I've been it would be coonted to your credit. I'll take anither
gill; and if ye ask me, I would drench the butter-milk wi' something
o' the same, for the look o' ye sittin' there's enough to gie me the
waterbrash. Mrs. Clerihew--here!” He rapped loudly on the table, and
the drink coming in I was compelled again to see him soak himself at my
expense. He reverted to my passage from the country, and “Five pounds is
little enough for it,” said he; “but ye might be eking it oot by partly
working your passage.”

“I didn't say I was going either to Nova Scotia or with you,” said I,
“and I think I could make a better bargain elsewhere.”

“So could I, maybe,” said he, fuming of spirits till I felt sick. “And
it's time I was doin' something for the good of my country.” With that
he rose to his feet with a look of great moral resolution, and made as
if for the door, but by this time I understood him better.

“Sit down, ye muckle hash!” said I, and I stood over him with a most
threatening aspect.

“By the Lord!” said he, “that's a Greig anyway!”

“Ay!” said I. “ye seem to ken the breed. Can I get another vessel abroad
besides yours?”

“Ye can not,” said he, with a promptness I expected, “unless ye wait on
the _Sea Pyat_. She leaves for Jamaica next Thursday; and there's no'
a spark of the Christian in the skipper o' her, one Macallum from
Greenock.”

For the space of ten minutes I pondered over the situation. Undoubtedly
I was in a hole. This brute had me in his power so long as my feet were
on Scottish land, and he knew it. At sea he might have me in his power
too, but against that there was one precaution I could take, and I made
up my mind.

“I'll give you four pounds--half at leaving the quay and the other half
when ye land me.”

“My conscience wadna' aloo me,” protested the rogue; but the greed was
in his face, and at last he struck my thumb on the bargain, and when
he did that I think I felt as much remorse at the transaction as at the
crime from whose punishment I fled.

“Now,” said I, “tell me how you knew me and heard about--about--”

“About what?” said he, with an affected surprise. “Let me tell ye this,
Mr. Greig, or whatever your name may be, that Dan Risk is too much of
the gentleman to have any recollection of any unpleasantness ye may
mention, now that he has made the bargain wi' ye. I ken naethin'
aboot ye, if ye please: whether your name's Greig or Mackay or Habbie
Henderson, it's new to me, only ye're a likely lad for a purser's berth
in the _Seven Sisters._” And refusing to say another word on the topic
that so interested me, he took me down to the ship's side, where I found
the _Seven Sisters_ was a brigantine out of Hull, sadly in the want of
tar upon her timbers and her mainmast so decayed and worm-eaten that it
sounded boss when I struck it with my knuckles in the by-going.

Risk saw me doing it. He gave an ugly smile.

“What do ye think o' her? said he, showing me down the companion.

“Mighty little,” I told him straight. “I'm from the moors,” said I, “but
I've had my feet on a sloop of Ayr before now; and by the look of this
craft I would say she has been beeking in the sun idle till she rotted
down to the garboard strake.”

He gave his gleed eye a turn and vented some appalling oaths, and wound
up with the insult I might expect--namely, that drowning was not my
portion.

“There was some brag a little ago of your being a gentleman,” said I,
convinced that this blackguard was to be treated to his own fare if he
was to be got on with at all. “There's not much of a gentleman in the
like of that.”

At this he was taken aback. “Well,” said he, “don't you cross my temper;
if my temper's crossed it's gey hard to keep up gentility. The ship's
sound enough, or she wouldn't be half a dizen times round the Horn and
as weel kent in Halifax as one o' their ain dories. She's guid enough
for your--for our business, if ye please, Mr. Greig; and here's my mate
Murchison.”

Another tarry-breeks of no more attractive aspect came down the
companion.

“Here's a new hand for ye,” said the skipper humorously.

The mate looked me up and down with some contempt from his own height of
little more than five feet four, and peeled an oilskin coat off him.
I was clad myself in a good green coat and breeches with fine wool
rig-and-fur hose, and the buckled red shoon and the cock of my hat I
daresay gave me the look of some importance in tarry-breeks' eyes.
At any rate, he did not take Risk's word for my identity, but at last
touched his hat with awkward fingers after relinquishing his look of
contempt.

“Mr. Jamieson?” said he questioningly, and the skipper by this time was
searching in a locker for a bottle of rum he said he had there for the
signing of agreements. “Mr. Jamieson,” said the mate, “I'm glad to see
ye. The money's no; enough for the job, and that's letting ye know. It's
all right for Dan here wi' neither wife nor family, but--”

“What's that, ye idiot?” cried Risk turning about in alarm. “Do ye tak'
this callan for the owner? I tell't ye he was a new hand.”

“A hand!” repeated Murchison, aback and dubious.

“Jist that; he's the purser.”

Murchison laughed. “That's a new ornament on the auld randy; he'll be
to keep his keekers on the manifest, like?” said he as one who cracks a
good joke. But still and on he scanned me with a suspicious eye, and
it was not till Risk had taken him aside later in the day and seemingly
explained, that he was ready to meet me with equanimity. By that time
I had paid the skipper his two guineas, for the last of his crew was on
board, every man Jack of them as full as the Baltic, and staggering at
the coamings of the hatches not yet down, until I thought half of them
would finally land in the hold.




CHAPTER IX

WHEREIN THE “SEVEN SISTERS” ACTS STRANGELY, AND I SIT WAITING FOR THE
MANACLES

An air of westerly wind had risen after meridian and the haar was gone,
so that when I stood at the break of the poop as the brigantine crept
into the channel and flung out billows of canvas while her drunken
seamen quarrelled and bawled high on the spars, I saw, as I imagined,
the last of Scotland in a pleasant evening glow. My heart sank. It was
not a departure like this I had many a time anticipated when I listened
to Uncle Andys tales; here was I with blood on my hands and a guinea to
start my life in a foreign country; that was not the worst of it either,
for far more distress was in my mind at the reflection that I travelled
with a man who was in my secret. At first I was afraid to go near him
once our ropes were off the pawls, and I, as it were, was altogether
his, but to my surprise there could be no pleasanter man than Risk when
he had the wash of water under his rotten barque. He was not only a
better-mannered man to myself, but he became, in half an hour of the
Firth breeze, as sober as a judge. But for the roving gleed eye, and
what I had seen of him on shore, Captain Dan Risk might have passed for
a model of all the virtues. He called me Mr. Greig and once or twice
(but I stopped that) Young Hazel Den, with no irony in the appellation,
and he was at pains to make his mate see that I was one to be treated
with some respect, proffering me at our first meal together (for I was
to eat in the cuddy,) the first of everything on the table, and even
making some excuses for the roughness of the viands. And I could see
that whatever his qualities of heart might be, he was a good seaman, a
thing to be told in ten minutes by a skipper's step on a deck and his
grip of the rail, and his word of command. Those drunken barnacles of
his seemed to be men with the stuff of manly deeds in them, when at his
word they dashed aloft among the canvas canopy to fist the bulging sail
and haul on clew or gasket, or when they clung on greasy ropes and at a
gesture of his hand heaved cheerily with that “yo-ho” that is the chant
of all the oceans where keels run.

Murchison was a saturnine, silent man, from whom little was to be got of
edification. The crew numbered eight men, one of them a black deaf
mute, with the name of Antonio Ferdinando, who cooked in a galley little
larger than the Hazel Den kennel. It was apparent that no two of them
had ever met before, such a career of flux and change is the seaman's,
and except one of them, a fellow Horn, who was foremast man, a more
villainous gang I never set eyes on before or since. If Risk had raked
the ports of Scotland with a fine bone comb for vermin, he could not
have brought together a more unpleasant-looking crew. No more than two
of them brought a bag on board, and so ragged was their appearance that
I felt ashamed to air my own good clothes on the same deck with them.

Fortunately it seemed I had nothing to do with them nor they with me;
all that was ordered for the eking out of my passage, as Risk had
said, was to copy the manifest, and I had no sooner set to that than I
discerned it was a gowk's job just given me to keep me in employ in the
cabin. Whatever his reason, the man did not want me about his deck. I
saw that in an interlude in my writing, when I came up from his airless
den to learn what progress old rotten-beams made under all her canvas.

It had declined to a mere handful of wind, and the vessel scarcely
moved, seemed indeed steadfast among the sea-birds that swooped and
wheeled and cried around her. I saw the sun just drop among blood-red
clouds over Stirling, and on the shore of Fife its pleasant glow. The
sea swung flat and oily, running to its ebb, and lapping discernibly
upon a recluse promontory of land with a stronghold on it.

“What do you call yon, Horn?” I said to the seaman I have before
mentioned, who leaned upon the taffrail and watched the vessel's greasy
wake, and I pointed to the gloomy buildings on the shore.

“Blackness Castle,” said he, and he had time to tell no more, for the
skipper bawled upon him for a shirking dog, and ordered the flemishing
of some ropes loose upon the forward deck. Nor was I exempt from
his zeal for the industry of other folks for he came up to me with
a suspicious look, as if he feared I had been hearing news from his
foremast man, and “How goes the manifest, Mr. Greig?” says he.

“Oh, brawly, brawly!” said I, determined to begin with Captain Daniel
Risk as I meant to end.

He grew purple, but restrained himself with an effort. “This is not
an Ayr sloop, Mr. Greig,” said he; “and when orders go on the _Seven
Sisters_ I like to see them implemented. You must understand that
there's a pressing need for your clerking, or I would not be so soon
putting you at it.”

“At this rate of sailing,” says I, “I'll have time to copy some hundred
manifests between here and Nova Scotia.”

“Perhaps you'll permit me to be the best judge of that,” he replied in
the English he ever assumed with his dignity, and seeing there was no
more for it, I went back to my quill.

It was little wonder, in all the circumstances, that I fell asleep over
my task with my head upon the cabin table whereon I wrote, and it was
still early in the night when I crawled into the narrow bunk that the
skipper had earlier indicated as mine.

Weariness mastered my body, but my mind still roamed; the bunk became
a coffin quicklimed, and the murderer of David Borland lying in it; the
laverock cried across Earn Water and the moors of Renfrew with the voice
of Daniel Risk. And yet the strange thing was that I knew I slept and
dreamed, and more than once I made effort, and dragged myself into
wakefulness from the horrors of my nightmare. At these times there was
nothing to hear but the plop of little waves against the side of the
ship, a tread on deck, and the call of the watch.

I had fallen into a sleep more profound than any that had yet blessed my
hard couch, when I was suddenly wakened by a busy clatter on the deck,
the shriek of ill-greased davits, the squeak of blocks, and the fall of
a small-boat into the water. Another odd sound puzzled me: but for the
probability that we were out over Bass I could have sworn it was the
murmur of a stream running upon a gravelled shore. A stream--heavens!
There could be no doubt about it now; we were somewhere close in shore,
and the _Seven Sisters_ was lying to. The brigantine stopped in her
voyage where no stoppage should be; a small boat plying to land in
the middle of the night; come! here was something out of the ordinary,
surely, on a vessel seaward bound. I had dreamt of the gallows and of
Dan Risk as an informer. Was it a wonder that there should flash into my
mind the conviction of my betrayal? What was more likely than that the
skipper, secure of my brace of guineas, was selling me to the garrison
of Blackness?

I clad myself hurriedly and crept cautiously up the companion ladder,
and found myself in overwhelming darkness, only made the more appalling
and strange because the vessel's lights were all extinguished. Silence
large and brooding lay upon the _Seven Sisters_ as she lay in that
obscuring haar that had fallen again; she might be Charon's craft
pausing mid-way on the cursed stream, and waiting for the ferry cry upon
the shore of Time. We were still in the estuary or firth, to judge
by the bickering burn and the odors off-shore, above all the odour of
rotting brake; and we rode at anchor, for her bows were up-water to
the wind and tide, and above me, in the darkness, I could hear the
idle sails faintly flapping in the breeze and the reef-points all
tap-tapping. I seemed to have the deck alone, but for one figure at the
stern; I went back, and found that it was Horn.

“Where are we?” I asked, relieved to find there the only man I could
trust on board the ship.

“A little below Blackness,” said he shortly with a dissatisfied tone.

“I did not know we were to stop here,” said I, wondering if he knew that
I was doomed.

“Neither did I,” said he, peering into the void of night. “And whit's
mair, I wish I could guess the reason o' oor stopping. The skipper's
been ashore mair nor ance wi' the lang-boat forward there, and I'm sent
back here to keep an e'e on lord kens what except it be yersel'.”

“Are ye indeed?” said I, exceedingly vexed. “Then I ken too well, Horn,
the reason for the stoppage. You are to keep your eye on a man who's
being bargained for with the hangman.”

“I would rather ken naithin' about that,” said he, “and onyway I think
ye're mistaken. Here they're comin' back again.”

Two or three small boats were coming down on us out of the darkness; not
that I could see them, but that I heard their oars in muffled rowlocks.

“If they want me,” said I sorrowfully, “they can find me down below,”
 and back I went and sat me in the cabin, prepared for the manacles.




CHAPTER X

THE STRUGGLE IN THE CABIN, AND AN EERIE SOUND OF RUNNING WATER

The place stank with bilge and the odour of an ill-trimmed lamp smoking
from a beam; the fragments of the skipper's supper were on the table,
with a broken quadrant; rats scurried and squealed in the bulkheads,
and one stared at me from an open locker, where lay a rum-bottle,
while beetles and slaters travelled along the timbers. But these
things compelled my attention less than the skylights that were masked
internally by pieces of canvas nailed roughly on them. They were not
so earlier in the evening; it must have been done after I had gone to
sleep, and what could be the object? That puzzled me extremely, for it
must have been the same hand that had extinguished all the deck and mast
lights, and though black was my crime darkness was unnecessary to my
betrayal.

I waited with a heart like lead.

I heard the boats swung up on the davits, the squeak of the falls, the
tread of the seamen, the voice of Risk in an unusually low tone. In the
bows in a little I heard the windlass click and the chains rasp in the
hawse-holes; we were lifting the anchor.

For a moment hope possessed me. If we were weighing anchor then my
arrest was not imminent at least; but that consolation lasted briefly
when I thought of the numerous alternatives to imprisonment in
Blackness.

We were under weigh again; there was a heel to port, and a more rapid
plop of the waters along the carvel planks. And then Risk and his mate
came down.

I have seldom seen a man more dashed than the skipper when he saw me
sitting waiting on him, clothed and silent. His face grew livid; round
he turned to Murchison and hurried him with oaths to come and clap eyes
on this sea-clerk. I looked for the officer behind them, but they were
alone, and at that I thought more cheerfully I might have been mistaken
about the night's curious proceedings.

“Anything wrang?” said Risk, affecting nonchalance now that his spate of
oaths was by, and he pulled the rum out of the locker and helped himself
and his mate to a swingeing caulker.

“Oh, nothing at all,” said I, “at least nothing that I know of, Captain
Risk. And are we--are we--at Halifax already?”

“What do you mean?” said he. And then he looked at me closely, put out
the hand unoccupied by his glass and ran an insolent dirty finger over
my new-clipped mole. “Greig, Greig,” said he, “Greig to a hair! I would
have the wee shears to that again, for its growin'.”

“You're a very noticing man,” said I, striking down his hand no way
gently, and remembering that he had seen my scissors when I emerged from
the Borrowstouness close after my own barbering.

“I'm all that,” he replied, with a laugh, and all the time Murchison,
the mate, sat mopping his greasy face with a rag, as one after hard
work, and looked on us with wonder at what we meant. “I'm all that,”
 he replied, “the hair aff the mole and the horse-hair on your creased
breeches wad hae tauld ony ane that ye had ridden in a hurry and clipped
in a fricht o' discovery.”

“Oh, oh!” I cried, “and that's what goes to the makin' o' a Mahoun!”

“Jist that,” said he, throwing himself on a seat with an easy
indifference meant to conceal his vanity. “Jist observation and a knack
o' puttin' twa and twa thegether. Did ye think the skipper o' the _Seven
Sisters_ was fleein' over Scotland at the tail o' your horse?”

“The Greig mole's weel kent, surely,” said I, astonished and chagrined.
“I jalouse it's notorious through my Uncle Andy?”

Risk laughed at that. “Oh, ay!” said he, “when Andy Greig girned at ye
it was ill to miss seein' his mole. Man, ye might as well wear your name
on the front o' your hat as gae aboot wi' a mole like that--and--and
that pair o' shoes.”

The blood ran to my face at this further revelation of his astuteness.
It seemed, then, I carried my identity head and foot, and it was no
wonder a halfeyed man like Risk should so easily discover me. I looked
down at my feet, and sure enough, when I thought of it now, it would
have been a stupid man who, having seen these kenspeckle shoes once,
would ever forget them.

“My uncle seems to have given me good introductions,” said I. “They
struck mysel' as rather dandy for a ship,” broke in the mate, at last
coming on something he could understand.

“And did _you_ know Andy Greig, too?” said I. “Andy Greig,” he replied.
“Not me!”

“Then, by God, ye hinna sailed muckle aboot the warld!” said the
skipper. “I hae seen thae shoes in the four quarters and aye in a good
companionship.”

“They appear yet to retain that virtue,” said I, unable to resist the
irony. “And, by the way, Captain Risk, now that we have discussed the
shoes and my mole, what have we been waiting for at Blackness?”

His face grew black with annoyance.

“What's that to you?” he cried.

“Oh, I don't know,” I answered indifferently. “I thought that now ye had
got the best part o' your passage money ye might hae been thinking to do
something for your country again. They tell me it's a jail in there,
and it might suggest itself to you as providing a good opportunity for
getting rid of a very indifferent purser.”

It is one thing I can remember to the man's credit that this innuendo
of treachery seemed to make him frantic. He dashed the rum-glass at
his feet and struck at me with a fist like a jigot of mutton, and I had
barely time to step back and counter. He threw himself at me as he had
been a cat; I closed and flung my arms about him with a wrestler's grip,
and bent him back upon the table edge, where I might have broken his
spine but for Murchison's interference. The mate called loudly for
assistance; footsteps pounded on the cuddy-stair, and down came Horn.
Between them they drew us apart, and while Murchison clung to his
captain, and plied him into quietness with a fresh glass of grog, Horn
thrust me not unkindly out into the night, and with no unwillingness on
my part.

[Illustration 091]

It was the hour of dawn, and the haar was gone.

There was something in that chill grey monotone of sky and sea that
filled me with a very passion of melancholy. The wind had risen, and the
billows ran frothing from the east; enormous clouds hung over the land
behind us, so that it seemed to roll with smoke from the eternal fires.
Out from that reeking pit of my remorse--that lost Scotland where now
perhaps there still lay lying among the rushes, with the pees-weep's cry
above it, the thing from which I flew, our ship went fast, blown upon
the frothy billows, like a ponderous bird, leaving a wake of hissing
bubbling brine, flying, as it seemed, to a world of less imminent
danger, yet unalluring still.

I looked aloft at the straining spars; they seemed to prick the clouds
between the swelling sails; the ropes and shrouds stretched infinitely
into a region very grey and chill. Oh, the pallor! oh, the cold and
heartless spirit of the sea in that first dawning morn!

“It's like to be a good day,” said Horn, breaking in upon my silence,
and turning to him I saw his face exceeding hollow and wan. The watch
lay forward, all but a lad who seemed half-dozing at the helm; Risk and
his mate had lapsed to silence in the cuddy.

“You're no frien', seemingly, o' the pair below!” said Horn again,
whispering, and with a glance across his shoulder at the helm.

“It did not look as if I were, a minute or two ago,” said I. “Yon's a
scoundrel, and yet I did him an injustice when I thought he meant to
sell me.”

“I never sailed with a more cheat-the-widdy crew since I followed the
sea,” said Horn, “and whether it's the one way or the other, sold ye
are.”

“Eh?” said I, uncomprehending.

He looked again at the helm, and moved over to a water-breaker further
forward, obviously meaning that I should follow. He drew a drink of
water for himself, drank slowly, but seemed not to be much in the need
for it from the little he took, but he had got out of ear-shot of the
man steering.

“You and me's the gulls this time, Mr. Greig,” said he, whispering.
“This is a doomed ship.”

“I thought as much from her rotten spars,” I answered. “So long as she
takes me to Nova Scotia I care little what happens to her.”

“It's a long way to Halifax,” said he. “I wish I could be sure we were
likely even to have Land's End on our starboard before waur happens.
Will ye step this way, Mr. Greig?” and he cautiously led the way
forward. There was a look-out humming a stave of song somewhere in the
bows, and two men stretched among the chains, otherwise that part of the
ship was all our own. We went down the fo'c'sle scuttle quietly, and
I found myself among the carpenter's stores, in darkness, divided by a
bulkhead door from the quarters of the sleeping men. Rats were scurrying
among the timbers and squealing till Horn stamped lightly with his feet
and secured stillness.

“Listen!” said he.

I could hear nothing but the heavy breathing of a seaman within, and the
wash of water against the ship's sides.

“Well?” I queried, wondering.

“Put your lug here,” said he, indicating a beam that was dimly revealed
by the light from the lamp swinging in the fo'c'sle. I did so, and heard
water running as from a pipe somewhere in the bowels of the vessel.

“What's that?” I asked.

“That's all,” said he and led me aft again.

The dawn by now had spread over half the heavens; behind us the mouth of
the Firth gulped enormous clouds, and the fringe of Fife was as flat
as a bannock; before us the sea spread chill, leaden, all unlovely. “My
sorrow!” says I, “if this is travelling, give me the high-roads and the
hot noon.”

Horn's face seemed more hollow and dark than ever in the wan morning. I
waited his explanation. “I think ye said Halifax, Mr. Greig?” said he. “I
signed on, mysel', for the same port, but you and me's perhaps the only
ones on this ship that ever hoped to get there. God give me grace to get
foot on shore and Dan Risk will swing for this!”

Somebody sneezed behind us as Horn thus rashly expressed himself; we
both turned suddenly on the rail we had been leaning against, expecting
that this was the skipper, and though it was not Risk, it was one whose
black visage and gleaming teeth and rolling eyes gave me momentarily
something of a turn.

It was the cook Ferdinando. He had come up behind on his bare feet, and
out upon the sea he gazed with that odd eerie look of the deaf and dumb,
heedless of us, it seemed, as we had been dead portions of the ship's
fabric, seeing but the salt wave, the rim of rising sun, blood-red upon
the horizon, communing with an old familiar.

“A cauld momin', cook,” said Horn, like one who tests a humbug
pretending to be dumb, but Ferdinando heard him not.

“It might have been a man wi' all his faculties,” said the seaman
whispering, “and it's time we werena seen thegether. I'll tell ye later
on.”

With that we separated, he to some trivial duty of his office, I, with
a mind all disturbed, back to my berth to lie awake, tossing and
speculating on the meaning of Horn's mystery.




CHAPTER XI

THE SCUTTLED SHIP

When I went on deck next morning there was something great ado. We were
out of sight of land, sailing large, as the old phrase went, on a brisk
quarter breeze with top-sails atrip, and the sky a vast fine open blue.
The crew were gathered at the poop, the pump was clanking in the midst
of them, and I saw they were taking spells at the cruellest labour a
seaman knows.

At first I was noway troubled at the spectacle; a leak was to be
expected in old rotten-beams, and I went forward with the heart of me
not a pulse the faster.

Risk was leaning over the poop-rail, humped up and his beard on
his hands; Murchison, a little apart, swept the horizon with a
prospect-glass, and the pump sent a great spate of bilge-water upon the
deck. But for a man at the tiller who kept the ship from yawing in the
swell that swung below her counter the _Seven Sisters_ sailed at her
sweet will; all the interest of her company was in this stream of
stinking water that she retched into the scuppers. And yet I could not
but be struck by the half-hearted manner in which the seamen wrought;
they were visibly shirking; I saw it in the slack muscles, in the
heedless eyes.

Risk rose and looked sourly at me as I went up. “Are ye for a job?” said
he. “It's more in your line perhaps than clerkin'.”

“What, at the pumps? Is the old randy geyzing already?”

“Like a washing-boyne,” said he. “Bear a hand like a good lad! we maun
keep her afloat at least till some other vessel heaves in sight.”

In the tone and look of the man there was something extraordinary.
His words were meant to suggest imminent peril, and yet his voice was
shallow as that of a burgh bellman crying an auction sale, and his eyes
had more interest in the horizon that his mate still searched with the
prospect-glass than in the spate of bilge that gulped upon the deck.

Bilge did I say? Heavens! it was bilge no more, but the pure sea-green
that answered to the clanking pump. It was no time for idle wonder
at the complacence of the skipper; I flew to the break and threw
my strength into the seaman's task. “Clank-click, clank-click”--the
instrument worked reluctantly as if the sucker moved in slime, and in a
little the sweat poured from me.

“How is she now, Campbell?” asked Risk, as the carpenter came on deck.

“Three feet in the hold,” said Campbell airily, like one that had an
easy conscience.

“Good lord, a foot already!” cried Risk, and then in a tone of sarcasm,
“Hearty, lads, hearty there! A little more Renfrewshire beef into it,
Mr. Greig, if you please.”

At that I ceased my exertion, stood back straight and looked at the
faces about me. There was only one man in the company who did not seem
to be amused at me, and that was Horn, who stood with folded arms,
moodily eying the open sea.

“You seem mighty joco about it,” I said to Risk, and I wonder to this
day at my blindness that never read the whole tale in these hurried
events.

“I can afford to be,” he said quickly; “if I gang I gang wi' clean
hands,” and he spat into the seawater streaming from the pump where the
port-watch now were working with as much listlessness as the men they
superseded.

To the taunt I made no reply, but moved after Horn who had gone forward
with his hands in his pockets.

“What does this mean, Horn?” I asked him. “Is the vessel in great
danger?”

“I suppose she is,” said he bitterly, “but I have had nae experience o'
scuttled ships afore.”

“Scuttled!” cried I, astounded, only half grasping his meaning.

“Jist that,” said he. “The job's begun. It began last night in the run
of the vessel as I showed ye when ye put your ear to the beam. After I
left ye, I foun' half a dizen cords fastened to the pump stanchels; ane
of them I pulled and got a plug at the end of it; the ithers hae been
comin' oot since as it suited Dan Risk best, and the _Seven Ststers_ is
doomed to die o' a dropsy this very day. Wasn't I the cursed idiot that
ever lipped drink in Clerihew's coffin-room!”

“If it was that,” said I, “why did you not cut the cords and spoil the
plot?”

“Cut the cords! Ye mean cut my ain throat; that's what wad happen if the
skipper guessed my knowledge o' his deevilry. And dae ye think a gallows
job o' this kind depends a'thegither on twa or three bits o' twine?
Na, na, this is a very business-like transaction, Mr. Greig, and I'll
warrant there has been naethin' left to chance. I wondered at them bein'
sae pernicketty about the sma' boats afore we sailed when the timbers
o' the ship hersel' were fair ganting. That big new boat and sails frae
Kirkcaldy was a gey odd thing in itsel' if I had been sober enough to
think o't. I suppose ye paid your passage, Mr. Greig? I can fancy a
purser on the _Seven Sisters_ upon nae ither footin' and that made me
dubious o' ye when I first learned o' this hell's caper for Jamieson o'
the Grange. If ye hadna fought wi' the skipper I would hae coonted ye in
wi' the rest.”

“He has two pounds of my money,” I answered; “at least I've saved the
other two if we fail to reach Halifax.”

At that he laughed softly again.

“It might be as well wi' Risk as wi' the conger,” said he, meaningly.
“I'm no' sae sure that you and me's meant to come oot o' this; that's
what I might tak' frae their leaving only the twa o' us aft when they
were puttin' the cargo aff there back at Blackness.”

“The cargo!” I repeated.

“Of course,” said Horn. “Ye fancied they were goin' to get rid o' ye
there, did ye? I'll alloo I thought that but a pretence on your pairt,
and no' very neatly done at that. Well, the smallest pairt but the maist
valuable o' the cargo shipped at Borrowstouness is still in Scotland;
and the underwriters 'll be to pay through the nose for what has never
run sea risks.”

At that a great light came to me. This was the reason for the masked
cuddy skylights, the utter darkness of the _Seven Sisters_ while her
boats were plying to the shore; for this was I so closely kept at her
ridiculous manifest; the lists of lace and plate I had been fatuously
copying were lists of stuff no longer on the ship at all, but back in
the possession of the owner of the brigantine.

“You are an experienced seaman--?”

“I have had a vessel of my own,” broke in Horn, some vanity as well as
shame upon his countenance.

“Well, you are the more likely to know the best way out of this trap we
are in,” I went on. “For a certain reason I am not at all keen on it to
go back to Scotland, but I would sooner risk that than run in leash
with a scoundrel like this who's sinking his command, not to speak of
hazarding my unworthy life with a villainous gang. Is there any way out
of it, Horn?”

The seaman pondered, a dark frown upon his tanned forehead, where the
veins stood out in knots, betraying his perturbation. The wind whistled
faintly in the tops, the _Seven Sisters_ plainly went by the head; she
had a slow response to her helm, and moved sluggishly. Still the pump
was clanking and we could hear the water streaming through the scupper
holes. Risk had joined his mate and was casting anxious eyes over the
waters.

“If we play the safty here, Mr. Greig,” said Horn, “there's a chance o'
a thwart for us when the _Seven Ststers_ comes to her labour. That's oor
only prospect. At least they daurna murder us.”

“And what about the crew?” I asked. “Do you tell me there is not enough
honesty among them all to prevent a blackguardly scheme like this?”

“We're the only twa on this ship this morning wi' oor necks ootside tow,
for they're all men o' the free trade, and broken men at that,” said
Horn resolutely, and even in the midst of this looming disaster my
private horror rose within me.

“Ah!” said I, helpless to check the revelation, “speak for yourself, Mr.
Horn; it's the hangman I'm here fleeing from.”

He looked at me with quite a new countenance, clearly losing relish for
his company.

“Anything by-ordinar dirty?” he asked, and in my humility I did not have
the spirit to resent what that tone and query implied.

“Dirty enough,” said I, “the man's dead,” and Horn's face cleared.

“Oh, faith! is that all?” quo' he, “I was thinkin' it might be
coinin'--beggin' your pardon, Mr. Greig, or somethin' in the fancy way.
But a gentleman's quarrel ower the cartes or a wench--that's a different
tale. I hate homicide mysel' to tell the truth, but whiles I've had
it in my heart, and in a way o' speakin* Dan Risk this meenute has my
gully-knife in his ribs.”

As he spoke the vessel, mishandled, or a traitor to her helm, now that
she was all awash internally with water, yawed and staggered in the
wind. The sails shivered, the yards swung violently, appalling noises
came from the hold. At once the pumping ceased, and Risk's voice roared
in the confusion, ordering the launch of the Kirkcaldy boat.




CHAPTER XII

MAKES PLAIN THE DEEPEST VILLAINY OF RISK AND SETS ME ON A FRENCHMAN

When I come to write these affairs down after the lapse of years, I find
my memory but poorly retains the details of that terrific period between
the cry of Risk and the moment when Horn and I, abandoned on the doomed
vessel, watched the evening fall upon the long Kirkcaldy boat, her mast
stepped, but her sails down, hovering near us for the guarantee of our
eternal silence regarding the crime the men on her were there and then
committing. There is a space--it must have been brief, but I lived a
lifetime in it--whose impressions rest with me, blurred, but with the
general hue of agony. I can see the sun again sailing overhead in the
arching sky of blue; the enormous ocean, cruel, cold, spread out to the
line of the horizon; the flapping sails and drumming reef-points, the
streaming halliards and clew-garnets, the spray buffeting upon our hull
and spitting in our faces like an enemy; I hear the tumult of the seamen
hurrying vulgarly to save their wretched lives, the gluck of waters
in the bowels of the ship, the thud of cargo loose and drifting under
decks.

But I see and hear it all as in a dream or play, and myself someway
standing only a spectator.

It seemed that Risk and his men put all their dependence on the
long-boat out of Kirkcaldy. She was partly decked at the bows like a
Ballantrae herring-skiff, beamy and commodious. They clustered round her
like ants; swung her out, and over she went, and the whole hellish
plot lay revealed in the fact that she was all found with equipment and
provisions.

Horn and I made an effort to assist at her preparation; we were shoved
aside with frantic curses; we were beaten back by her oars when we
sought to enter her, and when she pushed off from the side of the _Seven
Sisters_, Dan Risk was so much the monster that he could jeer at our
perplexity. He sat at the tiller of her without a hat, his long hair,
that was turning lyart, blown by the wind about his black and mocking
eyes.

“Head her for Halifax, Horn,” said he, “and ye'll get there by-and-by.”

“Did I ever do ye any harm, skipper?” cried the poor seaman, standing on
the gunwale, hanging to the shrouds, and his aspect hungry for life.

“Ye never got the chance, Port Glesca,” cried back Risk, hugging the
tiller of the Kirkcaldy boat under his arm. “I'll gie ye a guess--

     Come-a-riddle, come-a-riddle, come-a-rote-tote-tote--

Oh to bleezes! I canna put a rhyme till't, but this is the sense o't--a
darkie's never deaf and dumb till he's deid. Eh! Antonio, ye rascal!”

He looked forward as he spoke and exchanged a villainous laugh with the
cook, his instrument, who had overheard us and betrayed.

“Ye would mak' me swing for it, would ye, John Horn, when ye get ashore?
That's what I would expect frae a keelie oot o' Clyde.”

It is hard to credit that man could be so vile as this, but of such
stuff was Daniel Risk. He was a fiend in the glory of his revenge upon
the seaman who had threatened him with the gallows; uplifted like a
madman's, his face, that was naturally sallow, burned lamp-red at his
high cheek-bones, his hale eye gloated, his free hand flourished as
in an exultation. His mate sat silent beside him on the stern-thwart,
clearing the sheets: the crew, who had out the sweeps to keep the boat's
bows in the wind, made an effort to laugh at his jocosities, but clearly
longed to be away from this tragedy. And all the time, I think, I stood
beside the weather bulwark, surrendered to the certainty of a speedy
death, with the lines of a ballad coming back again and again to my
mind:

     An' he shall lie in fathoms deep,
     The star-fish ower his een shall creep.
     An' an auld grey wife shall sit an' weep
     In the hall o' Monaltrie.

I thrust that ungodly rhyme from me each time that it arose, but in
spite of me at last it kept time to the lap of a wave of encroaching sea
that beat about my feet.

My silence--my seeming indifference--would seem to have touched the
heart that could not be affected by the entreaties of the seaman Horn.
At least Risk ceased his taunts at last, and cast a more friendly eye on
me.

“I'm saying, Greig,” he cried, “noo that I think o't, your Uncle Andy
was no bad hand at makin' a story. Ye've an ill tongue, but I'll thole
that--astern, lads, and tak' the purser aboard.”

The seamen set the boat about willingly enough, and she crept in to pick
me off the doomed ship.

At that my senses cleared like hill-well water. It was for but a
second--praise God! my instincts joyed in my reprieve; my hand never
released the cleat by which I steadied myself. I looked at Horn still
upon the lower shrouds and saw hope upon his countenance.

“Of course this man comes with me, Captain Risk?” said I.

“Not if he offered a thousand pounds,” cried Risk, “in ye come!” and
Murchison clawed at the shrouds with a boat-hook. Horn made to jump
among them and, with an oath, the mate thrust at him with the hook as
with a spear, striking him under the chin. He fell back upon the deck,
bleeding profusely and half insensible.

“You are a foul dog!” I cried to his assailant. “And I'll settle with
you for that!”

“Jump, ye fool, ye, jump!” cried Risk impatient.

“Let us look oot for oorselves, that's whit I say,” cried Murchison
angry at my threat, and prepared cheerfully to see me perish. “What
for should we risk oor necks with either o' them?” and he pushed off
slightly with his boat-hook.

The skipper turned, struck down the hook, and snarled upon him. “Shut
up, Murchison!” he cried. “I'm still the captain, if ye please, and I
ken as much about the clerk here as will keep his gab shut on any trifle
we hae dune.”

I looked upon the clean sea, and then at that huddle of scoundrels in
the Kirkcaldy boat, and then upon the seaman Horn coming back again to
the full consciousness of his impending fate. He gazed upon me with eyes
alarmed and pitiful, and at that I formed my resolution.

“I stick by Horn,” said I. “If he gets too, I'll go; if not I'll bide
and be drowned with an honest man.”

“Bide and be damned then! Ye've had your chance,” shouted Risk, letting
his boat fall off. “It's time we werena here.” And the halliards of his
main-sail were running in the blocks as soon as he said it. The boat
swept away rapidly, but not before I gave him a final touch of my irony.
From my pocket I took out my purse and threw it upon his lap.

“There's the ither twa, Risk,” I cried; “it's no' like the thing at all
to murder a harmless lad for less than what ye bargained for.”

He bawled back some reply I could not hear, and I turned about, to see
Horn making for the small boat on the starboard chocks. I followed with
a hope again wakened, only to share his lamentation when he found
that two of her planks had been wantonly sprung from their clinkers,
rendering her utterly useless. The two other boats were in a similar
condition; Risk and his confederates had been determined that no chance
should be left of our escape from the _Seven Sisters_.

It was late in the afternoon. The wind had softened somewhat; in the
west there were rising billowy clouds of silver and red, and half a mile
away the Kirkcaldy boat, impatient doubtless for the end of us, that
final assurance of safety, plied to windward with only her foresail set.
We had gone below in a despairing mind on the chance that the leakage
might be checked, but the holes were under water in the after peak, and
in other parts we could not come near. An inch-and-a-half auger, and a
large bung-borer, a gouge and chisel in the captain's private locker,
told us how the crime had been committed whereof we were the victims.

We had come on deck again, the pair of us, without the vaguest notion
of what was next to do, and--speaking for myself--convinced that nothing
could avert our hurrying fate. Horn told me later that he proposed full
half a score of plans for at least a prolongation of our time, but that
I paid no heed to them. That may be, for I know the ballad stanza went
in my head like a dirge, as I sat on a hatch with the last few days of
my history rolling out before my eyes. The dusk began to fall like a
veil, the wind declined still further. Horn feverishly hammered and
caulked at the largest of the boats, now and then throwing the tools
from him as in momentary realisations of the hopelessness of his toil
that finally left him in despair.

“It's no use, Mr. Greig,” he cried then, “they did the job ower weel,”
 and he shook his fist at the Kirkcaldy boat. He checked the gesture
suddenly and gave an astonished cry.

“They're gone, Greig,” said he, now frantic. “They're gone. O God!
they're gone! I was sure they couldna hae the heart to leave us at the
last,” and as he spoke I chanced to look astern, and behold! a ship with
all her canvas full was swiftly bearing down the wind upon us. We had
been so intent upon our fate that we had never seen her!

I clambered up the shrouds of the main-mast, and cried upon the coming
vessel with some mad notion that she might fancy the _Seven Sisters_
derelict. But indeed that was not necessary. In a little she went round
into the wind, a long-boat filled with men came towards us, and twenty
minutes later we were on the deck of the _Roi Rouge_.




CHAPTER XIII

WHEREIN APPEARS A GENTLEMANLY CORSAIR AND A FRENCH-IRISH LORD

While it may be that the actual crisis of my manhood came to me on the
day I first put on my Uncle Andrew's shoes, the sense of it was mine
only when I met with Captain Thurot. I had put the past for ever behind
me (as I fancied) when I tore the verses of a moon-struck boy and
cast them out upon the washing-green at Hazel Den, but I was bound
to foregather with men like Thurot and his friends ere the scope and
fashion of a man's world were apparent to me. Whether his influence on
my destiny in the long run was good or bad I would be the last to say;
he brought me into danger, but--in a manner--he brought me good, though
that perhaps was never in his mind.

You must fancy this Thurot a great tall man, nearly half a foot
exceeding myself in stature, peak-bearded, straight as a lance, with
plum-black eyes and hair, polished in dress and manner to the rarest
degree and with a good humour that never failed. He sat under a swinging
lamp in his cabin when Horn and I were brought before him, and asked my
name first in an accent of English that was if anything somewhat better
than my own.

“Greig,” said I; “Paul Greig,” and he started as if I had pricked him
with a knife.

A little table stood between us, on which there lay a book he had been
reading when we were brought below, some hours after the _Seven Sisters_
had gone down, and the search for the Kirkcaldy boat had been abandoned.
He took the lamp off its hook, came round the table and held the light
so that he could see my face the clearer. At any time his aspect was
manly and pleasant; most of all was it so when he smiled, and I was
singularly encouraged when he smiled at me, with a rapid survey of my
person that included the Hazel Den mole and my Uncle Andrew's shoes.

A seaman stood behind us; to him he spoke a message I could not
comprehend, as it was in French, of which I had but little. The seaman
retired; we were offered a seat, and in a minute the seaman came back
with a gentleman--a landsman by his dress.

“Pardon, my lord,” said the captain to his visitor, “but I thought that
here was a case--speaking of miracles--you would be interested in.
Our friends here”--he indicated myself particularly with a gracious
gesture--“are not, as you know, dropped from heaven, but come from that
unfortunate ship we saw go under a while ago. May I ask your lordship to
tell us--you will see the joke in a moment--whom we were talking of at
the moment our watch first announced the sight of that vessel?”

His lordship rubbed his chin and smilingly peered at the captain.

“Gad!” he said. “You are the deuce and all, Thurot. What are you in the
mood for now? Why, we talked of Greig--Andrew Greig, the best player of
_passe-passe_ and the cheerfullest loser that ever cut a pack.”

Thurot turned to me, triumphant.

“Behold,” said he, “how ridiculously small the world is. _Ma foi!_ I
wonder how I manage so well to elude my creditors, even when I sail the
high seas. Lord Clancarty, permit me to have the distinguished honour
to introduce another Greig, who I hope has many more of his charming
uncle's qualities than his handsome eyes and red shoes. I assume it is
a nephew, because poor Monsieur Andrew was not of the marrying
kind. Anyhow, 'tis a Greig of the blood, or Antoine Thurot is a bat!
And--Monsieur Greig, it is my felicity to bid you know one of your
uncle's best friends and heartiest admirers--Lord Clancarty.”

“Lord Clancarty!” I cried, incredulous. “Why he figured in my uncle's
log-book a dozen years ago.”

“A dozen, no less!” cried his lordship, with a grimace. “We need not be
so particular about the period. I trust he set me down there a decently
good companion; I could hardly hope to figure in a faithful scribe's
tablets as an example otherwise,” said his lordship, laughing and taking
me cordially by the hand. “Gad! one has but to look at you to see Andrew
Greig in every line. I loved your uncle, lad. He had a rugged, manly
nature, and just sufficient folly, bravado, and sinfulness to keep a
poor Irishman in countenance. Thurot, one must apologise for taking from
your very lips the suggestion I see hesitating there, but sure 'tis an
Occasion this; it must be a bottle--the best bottle on your adorable but
somewhat ill-found vessel. Why 'tis Andy Greig come young again. Poor
Andy! I heard of his death no later than a month ago, and have ordered
a score of masses for him--which by the way are still unpaid for to good
Father Hamilton. I could not sleep happily of an evening--of a forenoon
rather--if I thought of our Andy suffering aught that a few candles and
such-like could modify.” And his lordship with great condescension
tapped and passed me his jewelled box of maccabaw.

You can fancy a raw lad, untutored and untravelled, fresh from the
plough-tail, as it were, was vastly tickled at this introduction to the
genteel world. I was no longer the shivering outlaw, the victim of a
Risk. I was honoured more or less for the sake of my uncle (whose esteem
in this quarter my father surely would have been surprised at), and it
seemed as though my new life in a new country were opening better than I
had planned myself. I blessed my shoes--the Shoes of Sorrow--and for the
time forgot the tragedy from which I was escaping.

They birled the bottle between them, Clancarty and Thurot, myself
virtually avoiding it, but clinking now and then, and laughing with them
at the numerous exploits they recalled of him that was the bond between
us; Horn elsewhere found himself well treated also; and listening to
these two gentlemen of the world, their allusions, off-hand, to the
great, their indications of adventure, travel, intrigue, enterprise,
gaiety, I saw my horizon expand until it was no longer a cabin on the
sea I sat in, with the lamplight swinging over me, but a spacious world
of castles, palaces, forests, streets, churches, casernes, harbours,
masquerades, routs, operas, love, laughter, and song. Perhaps they saw
my elation and fully understood, and smiled within them at my efforts
to figure as a little man of the world too--as boys will--but they never
showed me other than the finest sympathy and attention.

I found them fascinating at night; I found them much the same at
morning, which is the test of the thing in youth, and straightway made a
hero of the foreigner Thurot. Clancarty was well enough, but without
any method in his life, beyond a principle of keeping his character ever
trim and presentable like his cravat. Thurot carried on his strenuous
career as soldier, sailor, spy, politician, with a plausible enough
theory that thus he got the very juice and pang of life, that at the
most, as he would aye be telling me, was brief to an absurdity.

“Your Scots,” he would say to me, “as a rule, are too phlegmatic--is it
not, Lord Clancarty?--but your uncle gave me, on my word, a regard for
your whole nation. He had aplomb--Monsieur Andrew; he had luck too, and
if he cracked a nut anywhere there was always a good kernel in it.” And
the shoes see how I took the allusion to King George, and that gave me a
flood of light upon my new position.

I remembered that in my uncle's log-book the greater part of the
narrative of his adventures in France had to do with politics and the
intrigues of the Jacobite party. He was not, himself, apparently, “out,”
 as we call it, in the affair of the 'Forty-five, because he did not
believe the occasion suitable, and thought the Prince precipitous, but
before and after that untoward event for poor Scotland, he had been
active with such men as Clancarty, Lord Clare, the Murrays, the
Mareschal, and such-like, which was not to be wondered at, perhaps, for
our family had consistently been Jacobite, a fact that helped to its
latter undoing, though my father as nominal head of the house had taken
no interest in politics; and my own sympathies had ever been with the
Chevalier, whom I as a boy had seen ride through the city of Glasgow,
wishing myself old enough to be his follower in such a glittering
escapade as he was then embarked on.

But though I thought all this in a flash as it were, I betrayed nothing
to Captain Thurot, who seemed somewhat dashed at my silence. There must
have been something in my face, however, to show that I fully realised
what he was feeling at, and was not too complacent, for Clancarty
laughed.

“Sure, 'tis a good boy, Thurot,” said he, “and loves his King George
properly, like a true patriot.”

“I won't believe it of a Greig,” said Captain Thurot. “A pestilent,
dull thing, loyalty in England; the other thing came much more readily,
I remember, to the genius of Andrew Greig. Come! Monsieur Paul, to be
quite frank about it, have you no instincts of friendliness to the
exiled house? M. Tête-de-fer has a great need at this particular moment
for English friends. Once he could count on your uncle to the last
ditch; can he count on the nephew?”

“M. Tête-de-fer?” I repeated, somewhat bewildered.

“M. Tête-de-mouche, rather,” cried my lord, testily, and then hurried to
correct himself. “He alluded, Monsieur Greig, to Prince Charles Edward.
We are all, I may confess, his Royal Highness's most humble servants;
some of us, however--as our good friend, Captain Thurot--more actively
than others. For myself I begin to weary of a cause that has
been dormant for eight years, but no matter; sure one must have a
recreation!”

I looked at his lordship to see if he was joking. He was the relic of
a handsome man, though still, I daresay, less than fifty years of age,
with a clever face and gentle, just tinged by the tracery of small
surface veins to a redness that accused him of too many late nights;
his mouth and eyes, that at one time must have been fascinating, had
the ultimate irresolution that comes to one who finds no fingerposts at
life's cross-roads and thinks one road just as good's another. He was
born at Atena, near Hamburg (so much I had remembered from my uncle's
memoir), but he was, even in his accent, as Irish as Kerry. Someway I
liked and yet doubted him, in spite of all the praise of him that I had
read in a dead man's diurnal.

“_Fi donc! vous devriez avoir honte, milord_,” cried Thurot, somewhat
disturbed, I saw, at this reckless levity.

“Ashamed!” said his lordship, laughing; “why, 'tis for his Royal
Highness who has taken a diligence to the devil, and left us poor
dependants to pay the bill at the inn. But no matter, Master Greig, I'll
be cursed if I say a single word more to spoil a charming picture of
royalty under a cloud.” And so saying he lounged away from us, a strange
exquisite for shipboard, laced up to the nines, as the saying goes,
parading the deck as it had been the Rue St. Honoré, with merry words
for every sailorman who tapped a forehead to him.

Captain Thurot looked at him, smiling, and shrugged his shoulders.

“_Tête-de-mouche!_ There it is for you, M. Paul--the head of a
butterfly. Now you--” he commanded my eyes most masterfully--“now _you_
have a Scotsman's earnestness; I should like to see you on the right
side. _Mon Dieu_, you owe us your life, no less; 'tis no more King
George's, for one of his subjects has morally sent you to the bottom of
the sea in a scuttled ship. I wish we had laid hands on your Risk and
his augers.”

But I was learning my world; I was cautious; I said neither yea nor nay.




CHAPTER XIV

IN DUNKERQUE--A LADY SPEAKS TO ME IN SCOTS AND A FAT PRIEST SEEMS TO
HAVE SOMETHING ON HIS MIND

Two days after, the _Roi Rouge_ came to Dunkerque; Horn the seaman went
home to Scotland in a vessel out of Leith with a letter in his pocket
for my people at Hazel Den, and I did my best for the next fortnight to
forget by day the remorse that was my nightmare. To this Captain Thurot
and Lord Clancarty, without guessing 'twas a homicide they favoured,
zealously helped me.

And then Dunkerque at the moment was sparkling with attractions.
Something was in its air to distract every waking hour, the pulse
of drums, the sound of trumpets calling along the shores, troops
manoeuvring, elation apparent in every countenance. I was Thurot's guest
in a lodging over a _boulangerie_ upon the sea front, and at daybreak I
would look out from the little window to see regiments of horse and foot
go by on their way to an enormous camp beside the old fort of Risebank.
Later in the morning I would see the soldiers toiling at the grand
sluice for deepening the harbour or repairing the basin, or on the dunes
near Graveline manoeuvring under the command of the Prince de Soubise
and Count St. Germain. All day the paving thundered with the roll of
tumbrels, with the noise of plunging horse; all night the front of
the _boulangerie_ was clamorous with carriages bearing cannon, timber,
fascines, gabions, and other military stores.

Thurot, with his ship in harbour, became a man of the town, with ruffled
neck- and wrist-bands, the most extravagant of waistcoats, hats laced
with point d'Espagne, and up and down Dunkerque he went with a restless
foot as if the conduct of the world depended on him. He sent an old
person, a reduced gentleman, to me to teach me French that I laboured
with as if my life depended on it from a desire to be as soon as
possible out of his reverence, for, to come to the point and be done
with it, he was my benefactor to the depth of my purse.

Sometimes Lord Clancarty asked me out to a _déjeuner_. He moved in a
society where I met many fellow countrymen--Captain Foley, of Rooth's
regiment; Lord Roscommon and his brother young Dillon; Lochgarry,
Lieutenant-Colonel of Ogilvie's Corps, among others, and by-and-by
I became known favourably in what, if it was not actually the select
society of Dunkerque, was so at least in the eyes of a very ignorant
young gentleman from the moors of Mearns.

It was so strange a thing as to be almost incredible, but my Uncle
Andy's shoes seemed to have some magic quality that brought them for
ever on tracks they had taken before, and if my cast of countenance did
not proclaim me a Greig wherever I went, the shoes did so. They were a
passport to the favour of folks the most divergent in social state--to
a poor Swiss who kept the door and attended on the table at Clancarty's
(my uncle, it appeared, had once saved his life), and to Soubise
himself, who counted my uncle the bravest man and the best mimic he had
ever met, and on that consideration alone pledged his influence to find
me a post.

You may be sure I did not wear such tell-tale shoes too often. I began
to have a freit about them as he had to whom they first belonged, and to
fancy them somehow bound up with my fortune.

I put them on only when curiosity prompted me to test what new
acquaintances they might make me, and one day I remember I donned them
for a party of blades at Lord Clancarty's, the very day indeed upon
which the poor Swiss, weeping, told me what he owed to the old rogue
with the scarred brow now lying dead in the divots of home.

There was a new addition to the company that afternoon--a priest who
passed with the name of Father Hamilton, though, as I learned later, he
was formerly Vliegh, a Fleming, born at Ostend, and had been educated
partly at the College Major of Louvain and partly in London. He was
or had been parish priest of Dixmunde near Ostend, and his most
decent memory of my uncle, whom he, too, knew, was a challenge to a
drinking-bout in which the thin man of Meams had been several bottles
more thirsty than the fat priest of Dixmunde.

He was corpulent beyond belief, with a dewlap like an ox; great limbs,
a Gargantuan appetite, and a laugh like thunder that at its loudest
created such convulsions of his being as compelled him to unbutton the
neck of his _soutane_, else he had died of a seizure.

His friends at Lord Clancarty's played upon him a little joke wherein I
took an unconscious part. It seemed they had told him Mr. Andrew Greig
was not really dead, but back in France and possessed of an elixir of
youth which could make the ancient and furrowed hills themselves look
like yesterday's creations.

“What! M. Andrew!” he had cried. “An elixir of grease were more in the
fellow's line; I have never seen a man's viands give so scurvy a return
for the attention he paid them. 'Tis a pole--this M. Andrew--but what a
head--what a head!”

“Oh! but 'tis true of the elixir,” they protested; “and he looks thirty
years younger; here he comes!”

It was then that I stepped in with the servant bawling my name, and the
priest surged to his feet with his face all quivering.

“What! M. Andrew!” he cried; “fattened and five-and-twenty. Holy Mother!
It is, then, that miracles are possible? I shall have a hogshead,
master, of thine infernal essence and drink away this paunch, and skip
anon like to the goats of--of-”

And then his friends burst into peals of laughter as much at my
bewilderment as at his credulity, and he saw that it was all a
pleasantry.

“Mon Dieu!” he said, sighing like a November forest. “There was never
more pestilent gleek played upon a wretched man. Oh! oh! oh! I had an
angelic dream for that moment of your entrance, for I saw me again a
stripling--a stripling--and the girl's name was--never mind. God rest
her! she is under grass in Louvain.”

All the rest of the day--at Clancarty's, at the Café de la Poste, in our
walk along the dunes where cannon were being fired at marks well out at
sea, this obese cleric scarcely let his eyes off me. He seemed to envy
and admire, and then again he would appear to muse upon my countenance,
debating with himself as one who stands at a shop window pondering a
purchase that may be on the verge of his means.

Captain Thurot observed his interest, and took an occasion to whisper to
me.

“Have a care, M. Greig,” said he playfully; “this priest schemes
something; that's ever the worst of your Jesuits, and you may swear 'tis
not your eternal salvation.”

'Twas that afternoon we went all together to the curious lodging in the
Rue de la Boucherie. I remember as it had been yesterday how sunny
was the weather, and how odd it seemed to me that there should be a
country-woman of my own there.

She was not, as it seems to me now, lovely, though where her features
failed of perfection it would beat me to disclose, but there was
something inexpressibly fascinating in her--in the mild, kind, melting
eyes, and the faint sad innuendo of her smile. She sat at a spinet
playing, and for the sake of this poor exile, sang some of the songs we
are acquainted with at home. Upon my word, the performance touched me
to the core! I felt sick for home: my mother's state, the girl at
Kirkillstane, the dead lad on the moor, sounds of Earn Water, clouds and
heather on the hill of Ballageich--those mingled matters swept through
my thoughts as I sat with these blithe gentlemen, hearkening to a simple
Doric tune, and my eyes filled irrestrainably with tears.

Miss Walkinshaw--for so her name was--saw what effect her music had
produced; reddened, ceased her playing, took me to the window while the
others discussed French poetry, and bade me tell her, as we looked out
upon the street, all about myself and of my home. She was, perhaps, ten
years my senior, and I ran on like a child.

“The Mearns!” said she. “Oh dear, oh dear! And you come frae the Meams!”
 She dropped into her Scots that showed her heart was true, and told me
she had often had her May milk in my native parish.

“And you maybe know,” said she, flushing, “the toun of Glasgow, and the
house of Walkinshaw, my--my father, there?”

I knew the house very well, but no more of it than that it existed.

It was in her eyes the tears were now, talking of her native place, but
she quickly changed the topic ere I could learn much about her, and
she guessed--with a smile coming through her tears, like a sun through
mist--that I must have been in love and wandered in its fever, to be so
far from home at my age.

“There was a girl,” I said, my face hot, my heart rapping at the
recollection, and someway she knew all about Isobel Fortune in five
minutes, while the others in the room debated on so trivial a thing as
the songs of the troubadours.

“Isobel Fortune!” she said (and I never thought the name so beautiful
as it sounded on her lips, where it lingered like a sweet); “Isobel
Fortune; why, it's an omen, Master Greig, and it must be a good fortune.
I am wae for the poor lassie that her big foolish lad”--she smiled with
bewitching sympathy at me under long lashes--“should be so far away frae
her side. You must go back as quick as you can; but stay now, is it true
you love her still?”

The woman would get the feeling and the truth from a heart of stone; I
only sighed for answer.

“Then you'll go back,” said she briskly, “and it will be Earn-side again
and trysts at Ballageich--oh! the name is like a bagpipe air to me!--and
you will be happy, and be married and settle down--and--and poor Clemie
Walkinshaw will be friendless far away from her dear Scotland, but not
forgetting you and your wife.”

“I cannot go back there at all,” I said, with a long face, bitter
enough, you may be sure, at the knowledge I had thrown away all that she
depicted, and her countenance fell.

“What for no'?” she asked softly.

“Because I fought a duel with the man that Isobel preferred,
and--and--killed him!”

She shuddered with a little sucking in of air at her teeth and drew up
her shoulders as if chilled with cold.

“Ah, then,” said she, “the best thing's to forget. Are you a Jacobite,
Master Greig?”

She had set aside my love affair and taken to politics with no more than
a sigh of sympathy, whether for the victim of my jealousy, or Isobel
Fortune, or for me, I could not say.

“I'm neither one thing nor another,” said I. “My father is a staunch
enough royalist, and so, I daresay, I would be too if I had not got a
gliff of bonnie Prince Charlie at the Tontine of Glasgow ten years ago.”

“Ten years ago!” she repeated, staring abstracted out at the window.
“Ten years ago! So it was; I thought it was a lifetime since. And what
did you think of him?”

Whatever my answer might have been it never got the air, for here
Clancarty, who had had a message come to the door for him, joined us at
the window, and she turned to him with some phrase about the trampling
of troops that passed along the streets.

“Yes,” he said, “the affair marches quickly. Have you heard that England
has declared war? And our counter declaration is already on its way
across. _Pardieu!_ there shall be matters toward in a month or two and
the Fox will squeal. Braddock's affair in America has been the best
thing that has happened us in many years.”

Thus he went on with singular elation that did not escape me, though
my wits were also occupied by some curious calculations as to what
disturbed the minds of Hamilton and of the lady. I felt that I was in
the presence of some machinating influences probably at variance, for
while Clancarty and Roscommon and Thurot were elate, the priest made
only a pretence at it, and was looking all abstracted as if weightier
matters occupied his mind, his large fat hand, heavy-ringed, buttressing
his dewlap, and Miss Walkinshaw was stealing glances of inquiry at
him--glances of inquiry and also of distrust. All this I saw in a mirror
over the mantelpiece of the room.

“Sure there's but one thing to regret in it,” cried Clancarty suddenly,
stopping and turning to me, “it must mean that we lose Monsieur des
Souliers Rouges. _Peste!_ There is always something to worry one about a
war!”

“_Comment?_” said Thurot.

“The deportment,” answered his lordship. “Every English subject has
been ordered out of France. We are going to lose not only your company,
Father Hamilton, because of your confounded hare-brained scheme for
covering all Europe in a glass coach, but our M. Greig must put the
Sleeve between him and those best qualified to estimate and esteem his
thousand virtues of head and heart For a _louis_ or two I'd take ship
with him and fight on the other side. Gad! it would always be fighting
anyway, and one would be by one's friend.”

The priest's jaw fell as if my going was a blow to his inmost
affections; he turned his face rapidly into shadow; Miss Walkinshaw lost
no movement of his; she was watching him as he had been a snake.

“Oh! but it is not necessary that we lose my compatriot so fast as
that,” she said. “There are such things as permits, excepting English
friends of ours from deportment,--and--and--I fancy I could get one for
Mr. Greig.”

In my heart I thanked her for her ready comprehension of my inability to
go back to Britain with an easy mind; and I bowed my recognition of her
goodness.

She was paying no heed to my politeness; she had again an eye on the
priest, who was obviously cheered marvellously by the prospect.

And then we took a dish of tea with her, the lords and Thurot loudly
cheerful, Hamilton ruminant and thundering alternately, Miss Walkinshaw
showing a score of graces as hostess, myself stimulated to some unusual
warmth of spirit as I sat beside her, well-nigh fairly loving her
because she was my country-woman and felt so fond about my native
Mearns.




CHAPTER XV

WHEREIN A SITUATION OFFERS AND I ENGAGE TO GO TRAVELLING WITH THE PRIEST

A week passed with no further incident particularly affecting this
history. With my reduced and antique mentor I studied _la belle langue_,
sedulous by day, at night pacing the front of the sea, giving words to
its passion as it broke angry on the bar or thundered on the beach--the
sea that still haunts me and invites, whose absence makes often lonely
the moorland country where is my home, where are my people's graves. It
called me then, in the dripping weather of those nights in France--it
called me temptingly to try again my Shoes of Fortune (as now I named
them to myself), and learn whereto they might lead.

But in truth I was now a prisoner to that inviting sea. The last English
vessel had gone; the Channel was a moat about my native isle, and I
was a tee'd ball with a passport that was no more and no less than a
warder's warrant in my pouch. It had come to me under cover of Thurot
two days after Miss Walkinshaw's promise; it commanded _tous les
gouverneurs et tous les lieutenants-généraux de nos provinces et de nos
armées, gouverneurs particuliers et commandants de nos villes, places
et troupes_ to permit and pass the Sieur Greig anywhere in the country,
_sans lui donner aucun empêchement_, and was signed for the king by the
Duc de Choiseuil.

I went round to make my devoirs to the lady to whom I owed the favour,
and this time I was alone.

“Where's your shoon, laddie?” said she at the first go-off. “Losh! do
ye no' ken that they're the very makin' o' ye? If it hadna been for them
Clementina Walkinshaw wad maybe never hae lookit the gait ye were on.
Ye'll be to put them on again!” She thrust forth a _bottine_ like a
doll's for size and trod upon my toes, laughing the while with
her curious suggestion of unpractised merriment at my first solemn
acceptance of her humour as earnest.

“Am I never to get quit o' thae shoes?” I cried; “the very deil maun be
in them.”

“It was the very deil,” said she, “was in them when it was your Uncle
Andrew.” And she stopped and sighed. “O Andy Greig, Andy Greig! had I
been a wise woman and ta'en a guid-hearted though throughither Mearns
man's advice--toots! laddie, I micht be a rudas auld wife by my
preachin'. Oh, gie's a sang, or I'll dee.”

And then she flew to the spinet (a handsome instrument singularly out of
keeping with the rest of the plenishing in that odd lodging in the Rue
de la Boucherie of Dunkerque), and touched a prelude and broke into an
air.

To-day they call that woman lost and wicked; I have seen it said in
books: God's pity on her! she was not bad; she was the very football of
fate, and a heart of the yellow gold. If I was warlock or otherwise had
charms, I would put back the dial two score years and wrench her from
her chains.

     O waly, waly up the bank,
     O waly, waly doon the brae.
     And waly, waly yon burn-side,
     Where I and my love wont to gae.
     I leaned my back unto an aik,
     I thocht it was a trusty tree,
     But first it bowed and syne it brak,
     Sae my true love did lichtly me.

They have their own sorrow even in script those ballad words of an
exile like herself, but to hear Miss Walkinshaw sing them was one of the
saddest things I can recall in a lifetime that has known many sorrows.
And still, though sad, not wanting in a sort of brave defiance of
calumny, a hope, and an unchanging affection. She had a voice as sweet
as a bird in the thicket at home; she had an eye full and melting; her
lips, at the sentiment, sometimes faintly broke.

I turned my head away that I might not spy upon her feeling, for here,
it was plain, was a tragedy laid bare. She stopped her song mid-way with
a laugh, dashed a hand across her eyes, and threw herself into a chair.

“Oh, fie! Mr. Greig, to be backing up a daft woman, old enough to know
better, in her vapours. You must be fancying I am a begrutten bairn to
be snackin' my daidlie in this lamentable fashion, but it's just you and
your Mearns, and your Ballageich, and your douce Scots face and tongue
that have fair bewitched me. O Scotland! Scotland! Let us look oot at
this France o' theirs, Mr. Greig.” She came to the window (her movements
were ever impetuous, like the flight of a butterfly), and “Do I no' wish
that was the Gallowgate,” said she, “and Glasgow merchants were in
the shops and Christian signs abin the doors, like 'MacWhannal' and
'Mackay,' and 'Robin Oliphant'? If that was Bailie John Walkinshaw, wi'
his rattan, and yon was the piazza o' Tontine, would no' his dochter
be the happy woman? Look! look! ye Mearns man, look! look! at the bairn
playing pal-al in the close. 'Tis my little sister Jeanie that's married
on the great Doctor Doig--him wi' the mant i' the Tron kirk--and bairns
o' her ain, I'm tell't, and they'll never hear their Aunt Clemie named
but in a whisper. And yon auld body wi' the mob cap, that's the baxter's
widow, and there's carvie in her scones that you'll can buy for a bawbee
apiece.”

The maddest thing!--but here was the woman smiling through her tears,
and something tremulous in her as though her heart was leaping at her
breast. Suddenly her manner changed, as if she saw a sobering sight,
and I looked out again, and there was Father Hamilton heaving round the
corner of a lane, his face as red as the moon in a fog of frost.

“Ah!” cried Miss Walkinshaw, “here's France, sure enough, Mr. Greig. We
must put by our sentiments, and be just witty or as witty as we can be.
If you're no' witty here, my poor Mr. Greig, you might as well be dumb.
A heart doesna maitter much; but, oh! be witty.”

The priest was making for the house. She dried her tears before me, a
frankness that flattered my vanity; “and let us noo to our English, Mr.
Greig,” said she as the knock came to the door. “It need be nae honest
Scots when France is chappin'. Would you like to travel for a season?”

The question took me by surprise; it had so little relevance to what had
gone before.

“Travel?” I repeated.

“Travel,” said she again quickly. “In a glass coach with a companion
who has plenty of money--wherever it comes from--and see all Europe, and
maybe--for you are Scots like myself--make money. The fat priest wants a
secretary; that's the long and the short of it, for there's his foot on
the stairs, and if you'll say yes, I fancy I can get you the situation.”

I did not hesitate a second.

“Why, then yes, to be sure,” said I, “and thank you kindly.”

“Thank _you_, Paul Greig,” said she softly, for now the Swiss had opened
the door, and she squeezed my wrist.

“_Benedicite!_” cried his reverence and came in, puffing hugely after
his climb, his face now purple almost to strangulation. “May the devil
fly away with turnpike stairs, Madame!--puff-puff--I curse them whether
they be wood or marble;--puff-puff--I curse them Dunkerque; in Ostend,
Paris, all Europe itself, ay even unto the two Americas. I curse their
designers, artisans, owners, and defenders in their waking and sleeping!
Madame, kindly consider your stairs anathema!”

“You need all your wind to cool your porridge, as we say in Scotland,
Father Hamilton,” cried Miss Walkinshaw, “and a bonny-like thing it is
to have you coming here blackguarding my honest stairs.”

He laughed enormously and fell into a chair, shaking the house as if the
world itself had quaked. “Pardon, my dear Miss Walkinshaw,” said he when
his breath was restored, “but, by the Mass, you must confess 'tis the
deuce and all for a man--a real man that loves his viands, and sleeps
well o' nights, and has a contented mind and grows flesh accordingly,
to trip up to Paradise--” here he bowed, his neck swelling in massive
folds--“to trip up to Paradise, where the angels are, as easily as a
ballet-dancer--bless her!--skips to the other place where, by my faith!
I should like to pay a brief visit myself, if 'twere only to see old
friends of the Opéra Comique. Madame, I give you good-day. Sir, Monsieur
Greig--'shalt never be a man like thine Uncle Andrew for all thy
confounded elixir. I favour not your virtuous early rising in the young.
There! thine uncle would a-been abed at this hour an' he were alive and
in Dunkerque; thou must be a confoundedly industrious and sober Greig to
be dangling at a petticoat-tail--Pardon, Madame, 'tis the dearest tail,
anyway!--before the hour meridian.”

“And this is France,” thought I. “Here's your papistical gospeller at
home!” I minded of the Rev. Scipio Walker in the kirk of Mearns, an
image ever of austerity, waling his words as they had come from Solomon,
groaning even-on for man's eternal doom.

The priest quickly comprehended my surprise at his humour, and laughed
the more at that till a fit of coughing choked him. “_Mon Dieu_” said
he; “our Andy reincarnate is an Andy most pestilent dull, or I'm a
cockle, a convoluted cockle, and uncooked at that. Why, man! cheer up,
thou _croque mort_, thou lanthorn-jaw, thou veal-eye, thou melancholious
eater of oaten-meal!”

“It's a humblin' sicht!” said I. The impertinence was no sooner uttered
than I felt degraded that I should have given it voice, for here was a
priest of God, however odd to my thinking, and, what was more, a man who
might in years have been my father.

But luckily it could never then, or at any other time, be said of Father
Hamilton that he was thin-skinned. He only laughed the more at me.
“Touche!” he cried. “I knew I could prick the old Andy somewhere. Still,
Master Paul, thine uncle was not so young as thou, my cockerel. Had seen
his world and knew that Scotland and its--what do you call them?--its
manses, did not provide the universal ensample of true piety.”

“I do not think, Father Hamilton,” said I, “that piety troubled him very
much, or his shoes had not been so well known in Dunkerque.”

Miss Walkinshaw laughed.

“There you are, Father Hamilton!” said she. “You'll come little speed
with a man from the Mearns moors unless you take him a little more
seriously.”

Father Hamilton pursed his lips and rubbed down his thighs, an image
of the gross man that would have turned my father's stomach, who always
liked his men lean, clean, and active. He was bantering me, this fat
priest of Dixmunde, but all the time it was with a friendly eye. Thinks
I, here's another legacy of goodwill from my extraordinary uncle!

“Hast got thy pass yet, Master Dull?” said he.

“Not so dull, Master Minister, but what I resent the wrong word even in
a joke,” I replied, rising to go.

Thurot's voice was on the stair now, and Clan-carty's. If they were not
to find their _protégé_ in an undignified war of words with the priest
of Dixmunde, it was time I was taking my feet from there, as the saying
went.

But Miss Walkinshaw would not hear of it. “No, no,” she protested, “we
have some business before you go to your ridiculous French--weary be on
the language that ever I heard _Je t'aime_ in it!--and how does the same
march with you, Mr. Greig?”

“I know enough of it to thank my good friends in,” said I, “but that
must be for another occasion.”

“Father Hamilton,” said she, “here's your secretary.”

A curious flash came to those eyes pitted in rolls of flabby flesh, I
thought of an eagle old and moulting, languid upon a mountain cliff in
misty weather, catching the first glimpse of sun and turned thereby
to ancient memories. He said nothing; there was at the moment no
opportunity, for the visitors had entered, noisily polite and posturing
as was their manner, somewhat touched by wine, I fancied, and for that
reason scarcely welcomed by the mistress of the house.

There could be no more eloquent evidence of my innocence in these days
than was in the fact that I never wondered at the footing upon which
these noisy men of the world were with a countrywoman of mine. The cause
they often spoke of covered many mysteries; between the Rue de Paris
and the Rue de la Boucherie I could have picked out a score of Scots in
exile for their political faiths, and why should not Miss Walkinshaw be
one of the company? But sometimes there was just the faintest hint of
over-much freedom in their manner to her, and that I liked as little as
she seemed to do, for when her face flushed and her mouth firmed, and
she became studiously deaf, I felt ashamed of my sex, and could have
retorted had not prudence dictated silence as the wisest policy.

As for her, she was never but the minted metal, ringing true and decent,
compelling order by a glance, gentle yet secure in her own strength,
tolerant, but in bounds.

They were that day full of the project for invading England. It had
gone so far that soldiers at Calais and Boulogne were being practised in
embarkation. I supposed she must have a certain favour for a step that
was designed to benefit the cause wherefor I judged her an exile, but
she laughed at the idea of Britain falling, as she said, to a parcel of
_crapauds_. “Treason!” treason!” cried Thurot laughingly.

“Under the circumstances, Madame----”

“--Under the circumstances, Captain Thurot,” she interrupted quickly,
“I need not pretend at a lie. This is not in the Prince's interest, this
invasion, and it is a blow at a land I love. Mr. Greig here has just put
it into my mind how good are the hearts there, how pleasant the tongue,
and how much I love the very name of Scotland. I would be sorry to think
of its end come to pleasure the women in Versailles.”

“Bravo! bravo! _vive la bagatelle!_” cried my Lord Clancarty. “Gad! I
sometimes feel the right old pathriot myself. Sure I have a good mind--”

“Then 'tis not your own, my lord,” she cried quickly, displeasure in her
expression, and Clancarty only bowed, not a whit abashed at the sarcasm.

Father Hamilton drew me aside from these cheerful contentions, and
plunged into the matter that was manifestly occupying all his thoughts
since Miss Walkinshaw had mooted me as his secretary.

“Monsieur Greig,” he said, placing his great carcase between me and the
others in the room, “I declare that women are the seven plagues, and yet
here we come chasing them from _petit lever_ till--till--well, till as
late as the darlings will let us. By the Mass and Father Hamilton knows
their value, and when a man talks to me about a woman and the love he
bears her, I think 'tis a maniac shouting the praise of the snake that
has crept to his breast to sting him. Women--chut!--now tell me what the
mischief is a woman an' thou canst.”

“I fancy, Father Hamilton,” said I, “you could be convinced of the
merits of woman if your heart was ever attacked by one--your heart, that
does not believe anything in that matter that emanates from your head.”

Again the eagle's gleam from the pitted eyes; and, upon my word, a sigh!
It was a queer man this priest of Dixmunde.

“Ah, young cockerel,” said he, “thou knowest nothing at all about it,
and as for me--well, I dare not; but once--once--once there were dews in
the woods, and now it is very dry weather, Master Greig. How about thine
honour's secretaryship? Gripp'st at the opportunity, young fellow?
Eh? Has the lady said sooth? Come now, I like the look of my old
Andrew's--my old Merry Andrew's nephew, and could willingly tolerate
his _croque-mort_ countenance, his odour of the sanctuary, if he could
weather it with a plethoric good liver that takes the world as he finds
it.”

He was positively eager to have me. It was obvious from his voice. He
took me by the button of my lapel as if I were about to run away from
his offer, but I was in no humour to run away. Here was the very office
I should have chosen if a thousand offered. The man was a fatted sow to
look on, and by no means engaging in his manner to myself, but what was
I and what my state that I should be too particular? Here was a chance
to see the world--and to forget. Seeing the world might have been of
most importance some months ago in the mind of a clean-handed young
lad in the parish of Mearns in Scotland, but now it was of vastly more
importance that I should forget.

“We start in a week,” said the priest, pressing me closely lest I should
change my mind, and making the prospects as picturesque as he could.
“Why should a man of flesh and blood vex his good stomach with all this
babblement of king's wars? and a pox on their flat-bottomed boats!
I have seen my last Mass in Dixmunde; say not a word on that to our
friends nor to Madame; and I suffer from a very jaundice of gold. Is't a
pact, friend Scotland?”

A pact it was; I went out from Miss Walkinshaw's lodging that afternoon
travelling secretary to the fat priest.




CHAPTER XVI

RELATES HOW I INDULGED MY CURIOSITY AND HOW LITTLE CAME OF IT

Dunkerque in these days (it may be so no longer) was a place for a man
to go through with his nose in his fingers. Garbage stewed and festered
in the gutters of the street so that the women were bound to walk
high-kilted, and the sea-breeze at its briskest scarcely sufficed to
stir the stagnant, stenching atmosphere of the town, now villainously
over-populated by the soldiery with whom it was France's pleasant
delusion she should whelm our isle.

“_Pardieu!_” cried Father Hamilton, as we emerged in this malodorous
open, “'twere a fairy godfather's deed to clear thee out of this
feculent cloaca. Think on't, boy; of you and me a week hence riding
through the sweet woods of Somme or Oise, and after that Paris! Paris!
my lad of tragedy; Paris, where the world moves and folk live. And then,
perhaps, Tours, and Bordeaux, and Flanders, and Sweden, Seville, St.
Petersburg itself, but at least the woods of Somme, where the roads are
among gossamer and dew and enchantment in the early morning--if we cared
to rise early enough to see them, which I promise thee we shall not.”

His lips were thick and trembling: he gloated as he pictured me this
mad itinerary, leaning heavily on my arm--Silenus on an ash
sapling--half-trotting beside me, looking up every now and then to
satisfy himself I appreciated the prospect. It was pleasant enough,
though in a measure incredible, but at the moment I was thinking of Miss
Walkinshaw, and wondering much to myself that this exposition of foreign
travel should seem barely attractive because it meant a severance from
her. Her sad smile, her brave demeanour, her kind heart, her beauty had
touched me sensibly.

“Well, Master Scrivener!” cried the priest, panting at my side, “art
dumb?”

“I fancy, sir, it is scarcely the weather for woods,” said I. “I hope we
are not to put off our journey till the first of April a twelvemonth.”
 A suspicion unworthy of me had flashed into my mind that I might, after
all, be no more than the butt of a practical joke. But that was merely
for a moment; the priest was plainly too eager on his scheme to be
play-acting it.

“I am very grateful to the lady,” I hastened to add, “who gave me the
chance of listing in your service. Had it not been for her you might
have found a better secretary, and I might have remained long enough
in the evil smells of Dunkerque that I'll like all the same in spite of
that, because I have so good a friend as Miss Walkinshaw in it.”

“La! la! la!” cried out Father Hamilton, squeezing my arm. “Here's our
young cockerel trailing wing already! May I never eat fish again if
'tisn't a fever in this woman that she must infect every man under three
score. For me I am within a month of the period immune, and only feel a
malaise in her company. Boy, perpend! Have I not told thee every woman,
except the ugliest, is an agent of the devil? I am the first to
discover that his majesty is married and his wife keeps shop when he
is travelling--among Jesuits and Jacobites and such busy fuel for the
future fires. His wife keeps shop, lad, and does a little business among
her own sex, using the handsomest for her purposes. Satan comes back to
the _boutique_. 'What!' he cries, and counts the till, 'these have been
busy days, good wife.' And she, Madame Dusky, chuckles with a 'Ha! Jack,
old man, hast a good wife or not? Shalt never know how to herd in souls
like sheep till thou hast a quicker eye for what's below a Capuchin
hood.' This--this is a sweet woman, this Walkinshaw, Paul, but a
dangerous. 'Ware hawk, lad, 'ware hawk!”

I suppose my face reddened at that; at least he looked at me again and
pinched, and “Smitten to the marrow; may I drink water and grow thin
else. _Sacré nom de nom!_ 'tis time thou wert on the highways of
Europe.”

“How does it happen that a countrywoman of mine is here alone?” I asked.

“I'll be shot if thou art not the rascalliest young innocent in France.
Aye! or out of Scotland,” cried Father Hamilton, holding his sides for
laughter.

“Is thy infernal climate of fogs and rains so pleasant that a woman of
spirit should abide there for ever an' she have the notion to travel
otherwheres? La! la! la! Master Scrivener, and thou must come to an
honest pious priest for news of the world. But, boy, I'm deaf and dumb;
mine eyes on occasion are without vision. Let us say the lady has been
an over-ardent Jacobite; 'twill suffice in the meantime. And now has't
ever set eyes on Charles Edward?”

I told him I had never had any hand in the Jacobite affairs, if that was
what he meant.

His countenance fell at that.

“What!” he cried, losing his Roman manner, “do you tell me you have
never seen him?”

But once, I explained, when he marched into Glasgow city with his wild
Highlanders and bullied the burgesses into providing shoes for his
ragged army.

“Ah,” said he with a clearing visage, “that will suffice. Must point him
out to me. Dixmunde parish was a poor place for seeing the great; 'tis
why I go wandering now.”

Father Hamilton's hint at politics confirmed my guess about Miss
Walkinshaw, but I suppose I must have been in a craze to speak of her on
any pretence, for later in the day I was at Thurot's lodging, and there
must precognosce again.

“_Oh, mon Dieu, quelle espièglerie!_” cried out the captain. “And this
a Greig too! Well, I do not wonder that your poor uncle stayed so
long away from home; faith, he'd have died of an _ennui_ else. Miss
Walkinshaw is--Miss Walkinshaw; a countryman of her own should know
better than I all that is to be known about her. But 'tis not our
affair, Mr. Greig. For sure 'tis enough that we find her smiling,
gentle, tolerant, what you call the 'perfect lady'--_n'est ce pas?_And
of all the virtues, upon my word, kindness is the best and rarest, and
that she has to a miracle.”

“I'm thinking that is not a corsair's creed, Captain Thurot,” said I,
smiling at the gentleman's eagerness. He was standing over me like a
lighthouse, with his eyes on fire, gesturing with his arms as they had
been windmill sails.

“No, faith! but 'tis a man's, Master Greig, and I have been happy with
it. Touching our fair friend, I may say that, much as I admire her, I
agree with some others that ours were a luckier cause without her. Gad!
the best thing you could do, Mr. Greig, would be to marry her yourself
and take her back with you to Scotland.”

“What! byway of Paris in Father Hamilton's glass coach,” I said,
bantering to conceal my confusion at such a notion.

“H'm,” said he. “Father Hamilton and the lady are a pair.” He walked a
little up and down the room as if he were in a quandary. “A pair,” he
resumed. “I fancied I could see to the very centre of the Sphinx itself,
for all men are in ourselves if we only knew it, till I came upon
this Scotswoman and this infernal Flemish-English priest of Dix-munde.
Somehow, for them Antoine Thurot has not the key in himself yet. Still,
'twill arrive, 'twill arrive! I like the lady--and yet I wish she were a
thousand miles away; I like the man too, but a Jesuit is too many men
at once to be sure of; and, Gad! I can scarcely sleep at nights for
wondering what he may be plotting. This grand tour of his-”

“Stop, stop!” I cried, in a fear that he might compromise himself in an
ignorance of my share in the tour in question; “I must tell you that I
am going with Father Hamilton as his secretary, although it bothers me
to know what scrivening is to be accomplished in a glass coach. Like
enough I am to be no more, in truth, than the gentleman's companion or
courier, and it is no matter so long as I am moving.”

“Indeed, and is it so?” cried Captain Thurot, stopping as if he had been
shot. “And how happens it that this priest is willing to take you, that
are wholly a foreigner and a stranger to the country?”

“Miss Walkinshaw recommended me,” said I.

“Oh!” he cried, “you have not been long of getting into your excellent
countrywoman's kind favour. Is it that Tony Thurot has been doing
the handsome by an ingrate? No, no, Monsieur, that were a monstrous
innuendo, for the honour has been all mine. But that Miss Walkinshaw
should be on such good terms with the priest as to trouble with the
provision of his secretary is opposed to all I had expected of her. Why,
she dislikes the man, or I'm a stuffed fish.”

“Anyhow, she has done a handsome thing by me,” said I. “It is no wonder
that so good a heart as hers should smother its repugnances (and the
priest is a fat sow, there is no denying) for the sake of a poor lad
from its own country. You are but making it the plainer that I owe her
more than at first I gave her credit for.”

“Bless me, here's gratitude!” cried the captain, laughing at my warmth.
“Mademoiselle Walkinshaw has her own plans; till now, I fancied them
somewhat different from Hamilton's, but more fool I to fancy they were
what they seemed! All that, my dear lad, need not prevent your enjoying
your grand tour with the priest, who has plenty of money and the
disposition to spend it like a gentleman.”

Finally I went to my Lord Clancarty, for it will be observed that I had
still no hint as to the origin of the lady who was so good a friend of
mine. Though the last thing in the world I should have done was to pry
into her affairs for the indulgence of an idle curiosity, I would know
the best of her before the time came to say farewell, and leave of her
with me no more than a memory.

The earl was at the Café du Soleil d'Or, eating mussels on the terrace
and tossing the empty shells into the gutter what time he ogled passing
women and exchanged levitous repartee with some other frequenters of the
place.

“Egad, Paul,” he cried, meeting me with effusion, “'tis said there is
one pearl to be found for every million mussels; but here's a pearl come
to me in the midst of a single score. An Occasion, lad; I sat at the
dice last night till a preposterous hour this morning, and now I have a
headache like the deuce and a thirst to take the Baltic. I must have
the tiniest drop, and on an Occasion too. _Voilà! Gaspard, une autre
bouteille._”

He had his bottle, that I merely made pretence to help him empty, and I
had my precognition.

But it came to little in the long run. Oh yes, he understood my interest
in the lady (with rakish winking); 'twas a delicious creature for all
its _hauteur_ when one ventured a gallantry, but somehow no particular
friend to the Earl of Clancarty, who, if she only knew it, was come of
as noble a stock as any rotten Scot ever went unbreeched; not but what
(this with a return of the naturally polite man) there were admirable
and high-bred people of that race, as instance my Uncle Andrew and
myself. But was there any reason why such a man as Charlie Stuart should
be King of Ireland? “I say, Greig, blister the old Chevalier and his two
sons! There is not a greater fumbler on earth than this sotted person,
who has drunk the Cause to degradation and would not stir a hand to
serve me and my likes, that are, begad! the fellow's betters.”

“But all this,” said I, “has little to do with Miss Walkinshaw. I have
nothing to say of the Prince, who may be all you say, though that is not
the repute he has in Scotland.”

“Bravo, Mr. Greig!” cried his lordship. “That is the tone if you would
keep in the lady's favour. Heaven knows she has little reason to listen
to praise of such a creature, but, then, women are blind. She loves not
Clancarty, as I have said; but, no matter, I forgive her that; 'tis well
known 'tis because I cannot stomach her prince.”

“And yet,” said I, “you must interest yourself in these Jacobite
affairs and mix with all that are here of that party.”

“Faith and I do,” he confessed heartily. “What! am I to be a mole and
stay underground? A man must have his diversion, and though I detest the
Prince I love his foolish followers. Do you know what, Mr. Greig? 'Tis
the infernal irony of things in this absurd world that the good fellows,
the bloods, the men of sensibilities must for ever be wrapped up in poor
mad escapades and emprises. And a Clancarty is ever of such a heart that
the more madcap the scheme the more will he dote on it.”

A woman passing in a chair at this moment looked in his direction;
fortunately, otherwise I was condemned to a treatise on life and
pleasure.

“Egad!” he cried, “there's a face that's like a line of song,” and he
smiled at her with unpardonable boldness as it seemed to me, a pleasant
pucker about his eyes, a hint of the good comrade in his mouth.

She flushed like wine and tried to keep from smiling, but could not
resist, and smiling she was borne away.

“Do you know her, my lord?” I could not forbear asking.

“Is it know her?” said he. “Devil a know, but 'tis a woman anyhow, and
a heart at that. Now who the deuce can she be?” And he proceeded, like a
true buck, to fumble with the Mechlin of his fall and dust his stockings
in an airy foppish manner so graceful that I swear no other could have
done the same so well.

“Now this Miss Walkinshaw--” I went on, determined to have some
satisfaction from my interview.

“Confound your Miss Walkinshaw, by your leave, Mr. Greig,” he
interrupted. “Can you speak of Miss Walkinshaw when the glory of the
comet is still trailing in the heavens? And--hum!--I mind me of a
certain engagement, Mr. Greig,” he went on hurriedly, drawing a horologe
from his fob and consulting it with a frowning brow. “In the charm of
your conversation I had nigh forgot, so _adieu, adieu, mon ami!_”

He gave me the tips of his fingers, and a second later he was gone,
stepping down the street with a touch of the minuet, tapping his legs
with his cane, his sword skewering his coat-skirts, all the world giving
him the cleanest portion of the thoroughfare and looking back after him
with envy and admiration.




CHAPTER XVII

WITNESSES THE LAST OF A BLATE YOUNG MAN

And all this time it may well be wondered where was my remorse for a
shot fired on the moor of Mearns, for two wretched homes created by my
passion and my folly. And where, in that shifting mind of mine, was the
place of Isobel Fortune, whose brief days of favour for myself (if that,
indeed, was not imagination on my part) had been the cause of these my
wanderings? There is one beside me as I write, ready to make allowance
for youth and ignorance, the untutored affection, the distraught mind,
if not for the dubiety as to her feelings for myself when I was outlawed
for a deed of blood and had taken, as the Highland phrase goes, the
world for my pillow.

I did not forget the girl of Kirkillstane; many a time in the inward
visions of the night, and of the day too, I saw her go about that
far-off solitary house in the hollow of the hills. Oddly enough, 'twas
ever in sunshine I saw her, with her sun-bonnet swinging from its
ribbons and her hand above her eyes, shading them that she might look
across the fields that lay about her home, or on a tryst of fancy by
the side of Earn, hearing the cushats mourn in a magic harmony with her
melancholy thoughts. As for the killing of young Borland, that I kept,
waking at least, from my thoughts, or if the same intruded, I found it
easier, as time passed, to excuse myself for a fatality that had been in
the experience of nearly every man I now knew--of Clancarty and Thurot,
of the very baker in whose house I lodged and who kneaded the dough for
his little bread not a whit the less cheerily because his hands had been
imbrued.

The late Earl of Clare, in France called the Maréchal Comte de Thomond,
had come to Dunkerque in the quality of Inspector-General of the Armies
of France, to review the troops in garrison and along that menacing
coast. The day after my engagement with Father Hamilton I finished my
French lesson early and went to see his lordship and his army on the
dunes to the east of the town. Cannon thundered, practising at marks far
out in the sea; there was infinite manoeuvring of horse and foot;
the noon was noisy with drums and the turf shook below the hoofs of
galloping chargers. I fancy it was a holiday; at least, as I recall
the thing, Dunkerque was all _en fête_, and a happy and gay populace
gathered in the rear of the maréchales flag. Who should be there among
the rest, or rather a little apart from the crowd, but Miss Walkinshaw!
She had come in a chair; her dainty hand beckoned me to her side almost
as soon as I arrived.

“Now, that's what I must allow is very considerate,” said she, eyeing
my red shoes, which were put on that day from some notion of proper
splendour.

“Well considered?” I repeated.

“Just well considered,” said she. “You know how much it would please me
to see you in your red shoes, and so you must put them on.”

I was young in these days, and, like the ass I was, I quickly set about
disabusing her mind of a misapprehension that injured her nor me.

“Indeed, Miss Walkinshaw,” said I, “how could I do that when I did not
know you were to be here? You are the last I should have expected to see
here.”

“What!” she exclaimed, growing very red. “Does Mr. Greig trouble himself
so much about the _convenances?_ And why should I not be here if I have
the whim? Tell me that, my fastidious compatriot.”

Here was an accountable flurry over a thoughtless phrase!

“No reason in the world that I know of,” said I gawkily, as red as
herself, wondering what it was my foot was in.

“That you know of,” she repeated, as confused as ever. “It seems to
me, Mr. Greig, that the old gentleman who is tutoring you in the French
language would be doing a good turn to throw in a little of the manners
of the same. Let me tell you that I am as much surprised as you can be
to find myself here, and now that you are so good as to put me in mind
of the--of the--of the _convenances_, I will go straight away home. It
was not the priest, nor was it Captain Thurot that got your ear, for
they are by the way of being gentlemen; it could only have been this
Irishman Clancarty--the quality of that country have none of the
scrupulosity that distinguishes our own. You can tell his lordship, next
time you see him, that Miss Walkinshaw will see day about with him for
this.”

She ordered her chairmen to take her home, and then--burst into tears!

I followed at her side, in a stew at my indiscoverable blundering, my
_chapeau-de-bras_ in my hand, and myself like to greet too for sympathy
and vexation.

“You must tell me what I have done, Miss Walkinshaw,” I said. “Heaven
knows I have few enough friends in this world without losing your good
opinion through an offence of whose nature I am entirely ignorant.”

“Go away!” she said, pushing my fingers from the side of her chair, that
was now being borne towards the town.

“Indeed, and I shall not, Miss Walkinshaw, asking your pardon for the
freedom,” I said, “for here's some monstrous misconception, and I must
clear myself, even at the cost of losing your favour for ever.”

She hid her face in her handkerchief and paid no more heed to
me. Feeling like a mixture of knave and fool, I continued to walk
deliberately by her side all the way into the Rue de la Boucherie. She
dismissed the chair and was for going into the house without letting an
eye light on young persistency.

“One word, Miss Walkinshaw,” I pleaded. “We are a Scottish man and a
Scottish woman, our leelones of all our race at this moment in this
street, and it will be hard-hearted of the Scottish woman if she will
not give her fellow countryman, that has for her a respect and an
affection, a chance to know wherein he may have blundered.”

“Respect and affection,” she said, her profile turned to me, her foot on
the steps, visibly hesitating.

“Respect and affection,” I repeated, flushing at my own boldness.

“In spite of Clancarty's tales of me?” she said, biting her nether lip
and still manifestly close on tears.

“How?” said I, bewildered. “His lordship gave me no tales that I know
of.”

“And why,” said she, “be at such pains to tell me you wondered I should
be there?”

I got very red at that.

“You see, you cannot be frank with me, Mr. Greig,” she said bitterly.

“Well, then,” I ventured boldly, “what I should have said was that I
feared you would not be there, for it's there I was glad to see you. And
I have only discovered that in my mind since you have been angry with me
and would not let me explain myself.”

“What!” she cried, quite radiant, “and, after all, the red shoon were
not without a purpose? Oh, Mr. Greig, you're unco' blate! And, to tell
you the truth, I was just play-acting yonder myself. I was only making
believe to be angry wi' you, and now that we understand each ither you
can see me to my parlour.”

“Well, Bernard,” she said to the Swiss as we entered, “any news?”

He informed her there was none.

“What! no one called?” said she with manifest disappointment.

“_Personne, Madame_.”

“No letters?”

Nor were there any letters, he replied.

She sighed, paused irresolute a moment with her foot on the stair, one
hand at her heart, the other at the fastening of her coat, and looked at
me with a face almost tragic in its trouble. I cannot but think she was
on the brink of a confidence, but ere it came she changed her mind and
dashed up the stair with a tra-la-la of a song meant to indicate her
indifference, leaving me a while in her parlour while she changed
her dress. She came back to me in a little, attired in a pale
primrose-coloured paduasoy, the cuffs and throat embroidered in a
pattern of roses and leaves, her hair unpowdered and glossy, wantoning
in and out of a neck beyond description. The first thing she did on
entrance was odd enough, for it was to stand over me where I lounged
on her settee, staring down into my eyes until I felt a monstrous
embarrassment.

“I am wonderin',” said she, “if ye are the man I tak' ye for.”

Her eyes were moist; I saw she had been crying in her toilet room.

“I'm just the man you see,” I said, “but for some unco' troubles that
are inside me and are not for airing to my friends on a fine day in
Dunkerque.”

“Perhaps, like the lave of folks, ye dinna ken yoursel',” she went on,
speaking with no sprightly humour though in the Scots she was given to
fall to in her moments of fun. “All men, Mr. Greig, mean well, but most
of them fall short of their own ideals; they're like the women in that,
no doubt, but in the men the consequence is more disastrous.”

“When I was a girl in a place you know,” she went on even more soberly,
“I fancied all men were on the model of honest John Walkinshaw--better
within than without. He was stern to austerity, demanding the last
particle of duty from his children, and to some he might seem hard, but
I have never met the man yet with a kinder heart, a pleasanter mind, a
more pious disposition than John Walkin-shaw's. It has taken ten years,
and acquaintance with some gentry not of Scotland, to make it plain that
all men are not on his model.”

“I could fancy not, to judge from his daughter,” I said, blushing at my
first compliment that was none the less bold because it was sincere.

At that she put on a little mouth and shrugged her shoulders with a
shiver that made the snaps in her ears tremble.

“My good young man,” said she, “there you go! If there's to be any
friendship between you and Clementina Walkinshaw, understand there must
be a different key from that. You are not only learning your French, but
you are learning, it would seem, the manners of the nation. It was that
made me wonder if you could be the man I took you for the first day you
were in this room and I found I could make you greet with a Scots sang,
and tell me honestly about a lass you had a notion of and her no' me.
That last's the great stroke of honesty in any man, and let me tell you
there are some women who would not relish it. But you are in a company
here so ready with the tongue of flattery that I doubt each word they
utter, and that's droll enough in me that loves my fellow creatures, and
used to think the very best of every one of them. If I doubt them now
I doubt them with a sore enough heart, I'll warrant you. Oh! am I not
sorry that my man of Mearns should be put in the reverence of such
creatures as Clancarty and Thurot, and all that gang of worldlings? I do
not suppose I could make you understand it, Mr. Paul Greig, but I feel
motherly to you, and to see my son--this great giant fellow who kens the
town of Glasgow and dwelt in Mearns where I had May milk, and speaks wi'
the fine Scots tongue like mysel' when his heart is true--to see him the
boon comrade with folks perhaps good enough for Clementina Walkinshaw
but lacking a particle of principle, is a sight to sorrow me.”

“And is it for that you seek to get me away with the priest?” I asked,
surprised at all this, and a little resenting the suggestion of youth
implied in her feeling like a mother to me. Her face was lit, her
movement free and beautiful; something in her fascinated me.

She dropped in a chair and pushed the hair from her ears with a hand
like milk, and laughed.

“Now how could you guess?” said she. “Am I no' the careful mother of
you to put you in the hands o' the clergy? I doubt this play-acting
rhetorician of a man from Dixmunde is no great improvement on the rest
of your company when all's said and done, but you'll be none the worse
for seeing the world at his costs, and being in other company than
Clancarty's and Thurot's and Roscommon's. He told me to-day you were
going with him, and I was glad that I had been of that little service to
you.”

“Then it seems you think so little of my company as to be willing enough
to be rid of me at the earliest opportunity,” I said, honestly somewhat
piqued at her readiness to clear me out of Dunkerque.

She looked at me oddly. “Havers, Mr. Greig!” said she, “just havers!”

I was thanking her for her offices, but she checked me. “You are well
off,” she said, “to be away from here while these foolish manouvrings
are on foot. Poor me! I must bide and see them plan the breaking down
of my native country. It's a mercy I know in what a fiasco it will end,
this planning. Hearken! Do you hear the bugles? That's Soubise going
back to the caserne. He and his little men are going back to eat another
dinner destined to assist in the destruction of an island where you and
I should be this day if we were wiser than we are. Fancy them destroying
Britain, Mr. Greig!--Britain, where honest John Walkinshaw is, that
never said an ill word in his life, nor owed any man a penny: where the
folks are guid and true, and fear God and want nothing but to be left to
their crofts and herds. If it was England--if it was the palace of Saint
James--no, but it's Scotland, too, and the men you saw marching up and
down to-day are to be marching over the moor o' Mearns when the
heather's red. Can you think of it?” She stamped her foot. “Where the
wee thack hooses are at the foot o' the braes, and the bairns playing
under the rowan trees; where the peat is smelling, and the burns are
singing in the glens, and the kirk-bells are ringing. Poor Mr. Greig!
Are ye no' wae for Scotland? Do ye think Providence will let a man like
Thomond ye saw to-day cursing on horseback--do ye think Providence will
let him lead a French army among the roads you and I ken so well,
affronting the people we ken too, who may be a thought dull in the
matter of repartee, but are for ever decent, who may be hard-visaged,
but are so brave?”

She laughed, herself, half bitterly, half contemptuously, at the picture
she drew. Outside, in the sunny air of the afternoon, the bugles of
Soubise filled the street with brazen cries, and nearer came the roar
of pounding drums. I thought I heard them menacing the sleep of evening
valleys far away, shattering the calm of the hearth of Hazel Den.

“The cause for which--for which so many are exile here,” I said, looking
on this Jacobite so strangely inconsistent, “has no reason to regret
that France should plan an attack on Georgius Rex.”

She shook her head impatiently. “The cause has nothing to do with it,
Mr. Greig,” said she. “The cause will suffer from this madness more than
ever it did, but in any case 'tis the most miserable of lost causes.”

“Prince Charlie-”

“Once it was the cause with me, now I would sooner have it Scotland,”
 she went on, heedless of my interruption. “Scotland! Scotland! Oh, how
the name of her is like a dirge to me, and my heart is sore for her!
Where is your heart, Mr. Greig, that it does not feel alarm at the
prospect of these _crapauds_ making a single night's sleep uneasy for
the folks you know? Where is your heart, I'm asking?”

“I wish I knew,” said I impulsively, staring at her, completely
bewitched by her manner so variable and intense, and the straying
tendrils of her hair.

“Do you not?” said she. “Then I will tell you. It is where it ought to
be--with a girl of the name of Isobel Fortune. Oh, the dear name! oh,
the sweet name! And when you are on your travels with this priest do not
be forgetting her. Oh, yes! I know you will tell me again that all is
over between the pair of you, and that she loved another--but I am not
believing a word of that, Mr. Greig, when I look at you--(and will ye
say 'thank ye' for the compliment that's there?)--you will just go on
thinking her the same, and you will be the better man for it. There's
something tells me she is thinking of you though I never saw her, the
dear! Let me see, this is what sort of girl she will be.”

She drew her chair closer to the settee and leaned forward in front
of me, and, fixing her eyes on mine, drew a picture of the girl of
Kirkillstane as she imagined her.

“She will be about my own height, and with the same colour of hair-”

“How do you know that? I never said a word of that to you,” I cried,
astonished at the nearness of her first guess.

“Oh, I'm a witch,” she cried triumphantly, “a fair witch. Hoots! do I
no' ken ye wadna hae looked the side o' the street I was on if I
hadna put ye in mind o' her? Well, she's my height and colour--but,
alack-a-day, no' my years. She 'll have a voice like the mavis for
sweetness, and 'll sing to perfection. She'll be shy and forward in
turns, accordin' as you are forward and shy; she 'll can break your
heart in ten minutes wi' a pout o' her lips or mak' ye fair dizzy with
delight at a smile. And then”--here Miss Walkinshaw seemed carried away
herself by her fancy portrait, for she bent her brows studiously as she
thought, and seemed to speak in an abstraction--“and then she'll be a
managing woman. She'll be the sort of woman that the Bible tells of
whose value is over rubies; knowing your needs as you battle with the
world, and cheerful when you come in to the hearthstone from the turmoil
outside. A witty woman and a judge of things, calm but full of fire in
your interests. A household where the wife's a doll is a cart with one
wheel, and your Isobel will be the perfect woman. I think she must have
travelled some, too, and seen how poor is the wide world compared with
what is to be found at your own fire-end; I think she must have had
trials and learned to be brave.”

She stopped suddenly, looked at me and got very red in the face.

“A fine picture, Miss Walkinshaw!” said I, with something drumming at my
heart. “It is not just altogether like Isobel Fortune, who has long syne
forgot but to detest me, but I fancy I know who it is like.”

“And who might that be?” she asked in a low voice and with a somewhat
guilty look.

“Will I tell you?” I asked, myself alarmed at my boldness.

“No! no! never mind,” she cried. “I was just making a picture of a
girl I once knew--poor lass! and of what she might have been. But she's
dead--dead and buried. I hope, after all, your Isobel is a nobler woman
than the one I was thinking on and a happier destiny awaiting her.”

“That cannot matter much to me now,” I said, “for, as I told you, there
is nothing any more between us--except--except a corp upon the heather.”

She shuddered as she did the first time I told her of my tragedy, and
sucked in the air again through her clenched teeth.

“Poor lad! poor lad!” said she. “And you have quite lost her. If so, and
the thing must be, then this glass coach of Father Hamilton's must take
you to the country of forgetfulness. I wish I could drive there myself
this minute, but wae's me, there's no chariot at the _remise_ that'll do
that business for John Walkinshaw's girl.”

Something inexpressively moving was in her mien, all her heart was in
her face as it seemed; a flash of fancy came to me that she was alone in
the world with nothing of affection to hap her round from its abrasions,
and that her soul was crying out for love. Sweet beyond expression was
this woman and I was young; up to my feet I rose, and turned on her a
face that must have plainly revealed my boyish passion.

“Miss Walkinshaw,” I said, “you may put me out of this door for ever,
but I'm bound to say I'm going travelling in no glass coach; Dunkerque
will be doing very well for me.”

Her lips trembled; her cheek turned pale; s

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