The Shoes of Fortune
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“I have it on the very best authority,” he would say, “indeed” – with a whisper for all the passengers as if he feared the toiling horses outside might hear him – “indeed between ourselves I do not mind telling that it was from Sir Patrick Dall’s man – that the French would have been on top of us had not one of themselves sold the plot for a hatful of guineas.”
“That is not what I heard at all,” broke in the squire. “I fancy you are mistaken, sir. The truth, as I have every reason to believe, is that one of the spies of the Government – a Scotsman, by all accounts – discovered Conflans’ plans, and came over to London with them. A good business too, egad! otherwise we’d soon have nothing to eat at Morpeth George Inn on market days but frogs, and would find the parley-voos overrunning the country by next Lent with their masses and mistresses, and so on. A good business for merry old England that this spy had his English ears open.”
“It may be you are right, sir,” conceded the perruquier deferentially. “Now that I remember, Sir Patrick’s gentleman said something of the same kind, and that it was one of them Scotsmen brought the news. Like enough the fellow found it worth his while. It will be a pretty penny in his pocket, I’ll wager. He’ll be able to give up spying and start an inn.”
I have little doubt the ideal nature of retirement to an inn came to the mind of the peruke maker from the fact that at the moment we were drawing up before “The Crown” at Bawtry. Reek rose in clouds from the horses, as could be seen from the light of the doors that showed the narrow street knee-deep in snow; a pleasant smell of cooking supper and warm cordials came out to us, welcome enough it may be guessed after our long day’s stage. The widow clung just a trifle too long on my arm as I gallantly helped her out of the coach; perhaps she thought my silence and my abstracted gaze at her for the last hour or two betrayed a tender interest, but I was thinking how close the squire and the wig-maker had come upon the truth, and yet made one mistake in that part of their tale that most closely affected their silent fellow passenger.
The sea-fight and the war lasted us for a topic all through England, but when we had got into Scotland on the seventh day after my departure from London, the hostlers at the various change-houses yoked fresh horses to the tune of “Daniel Risk.”
We travelled in the most tempestuous weather. Snow fell incessantly, and was cast in drifts along the road; sometimes it looked as if we were bound for days, but we carried the mails, and with gigantic toil the driver pushed us through.
The nearer we got to Edinburgh the more we learned of the notorious Daniel Risk, whom no one knew better than myself. The charge of losing his ship wilfully was, it appeared, among the oldest and least heinous of his crimes. Smuggling had engaged his talent since then, and he had murdered a cabin-boy under the most revolting circumstances. He had almost escaped the charge of scuttling the Seven Sisters, for it was not till he had been in the dock for the murder that evidence of that transaction came from the seaman Horn, who had been wrecked twice, it appeared, and far in other parts of the world between the time he was abandoned in the scuttled ship and returned to his native land, to tell how the ruffian had left two innocent men to perish.
Even in these days of wild happenings the fame of Risk exceeded that of every malefactor that season, and when we got to Edinburgh the street singers were chanting doleful ballads about him.
I would have given the wretch no thought, or very little, for my own affairs were heavy enough, had not the very day I landed in Edinburgh seen a broad-sheet published with “The Last Words and Warning” of Risk. The last words were in an extraordinarily devout spirit; the homily breathed what seemed a real repentance for a very black life. It would have moved me less if I could have learned then, as I did later, that the whole thing was the invention of some drunken lawyer’s clerk in the Canongate, who had probably devised scores of such fictions for the entertainment of the world that likes to read of scaffold repentances and of wicked lives. The condition of the wretch touched me, and I made up my mind to see the condemned man who, by the accounts of the journals, was being visited daily by folks interested in his forlorn case.
With some manoeuvring I got outside the bars of his cell.
There was little change in him. The same wild aspect was there though he pretended a humility. The skellie eye still roved with little of the love of God or man in it; his iron-grey hair hung tawted about his temples. Only his face was changed and had the jail-white of the cells, for he had been nearly two months in confinement. When I entered he did not know me; indeed, he scarce looked the road I was on at first, but applied himself zealously to the study of a book wherein he pretended to be rapturously engrossed.
The fact that the Bible (for so it was) happened to be upside down in his hands somewhat staggered my faith in the repentance of Daniel Risk, who, I remembered, had never numbered reading among his arts.
I addressed him as Captain.
“I am no Captain,” said he in a whine, “but plain Dan Risk, the blackest sinner under the cope and canopy of heaven.” And he applied himself to his volume as before.
“Do you know me?” I asked, and he must have found the voice familiar, for he rose from his stool, approached the bars of his cage, and examined me. “Andy Greigs nephew!” he cried. “It’s you; I hope you’re a guid man?”
“I might be the best of men – and that’s a dead one – so far as you are concerned,” I replied, stung a little by the impertinence of him.
“The hand of Providence saved me that last item in my bloody list o’ crimes,” said he, with a singular mixture of the whine for his sins and of pride in their number. “Your life was spared, I mak’ nae doubt, that ye micht repent o’ your past, and I’m sorry to see ye in sic fallals o’ dress, betokenin’ a licht mind and a surrender to the vanities.”
My dress was scantily different from what it had been on the Seven Sisters, except for some lace, my tied hair, and a sword.
“Indeed, and I am in anything but a light frame of mind, Captain Risk,” I said. “There are reasons for that, apart from seeing you in this condition which I honestly deplore in spite of all the wrong you did me.”
“I thank God that has been forgiven me,” he said, with a hypocritical cock of his hale eye. “I was lost in sin, a child o’ the deevil, but noo I am made clean,” and much more of the same sort that it is unnecessary herp to repeat.
“You can count on my forgiveness, so far as that goes,” I said, disgusted with his manner.
“I’m greatly obleeged,” said he, “but man’s forgiveness doesna coont sae muckle as a preen, and I would ask ye to see hoo it stands wi’ yersel’, Daniel Risk has made his peace wi’ his Maker, but what way is it wi’ the nephew o’ Andrew Greig?”
“It ill becomes a man in a condemned cell to be preacher to those outside of it,” I told him in some exasperation at his presumption.
He threw up his hands and glowered at me with his gleed eye looking seven ways for sixpence as the saying goes.
“Dinna craw ower crouse, young man,” he said. “Whit brings ye here I canna guess, but I ken that you that’s there should be in here where I am, for there’s blood on your hands.”
He had me there! Oh, yes, he had me there! Every vein in my body told me so. But I was not in the humour to make an admission of that kind to this creature.
“I have no conceit of myself in any respect whatever, Daniel Risk,” I said slowly. “I came here from France but yesterday after experiences there that paid pretty well for my boy’s crime, for I have heard from neither kith nor kin since you cozened me on the boards of the Seven Sisters.”
He put his hands upon the bars and looked at me. He wore a prison garb of the most horrible colour, and there were round him the foul stenches of the cell.
“Ay!” said he. “New back! And they havena nabbed ye yet! Weel, they’ll no’ be lang, maybe, o’ doin’ that, for I’ll warrant ye’ve been advertised plenty aboot the country; ony man that has read a gazette or clattered in a public-hoose kens your description and the blackness o’ the deed you’re chairged wi’. All I did was to sink a bit ship that was rotten onyway, mak’ free trade wi’ a few ankers o’ brandy that wad hae been drunk by the best i’ the land includin’ the very lords that tried me, and accidentally kill a lad that sair needed a beltin’ to gar him dae his honest wark. But you shot a man deliberate and his blood is crying frae the grund. If ye hurry ye’ll maybe dance on naethin’ sooner nor mysel’.”
There was so much impotent venom in what he said that I lost my anger with the wretch drawing near his end, and looked on him with pity. It seemed to annoy him more than if I had reviled him.
“I’m a white soul.” says he, clasping his hands – the most arrant blasphemy of a gesture from one whose deeds were desperately wicked! “I’m a white soul, praise God! and value not your opinions a docken leaf. Ye micht hae come here to this melancholy place to slip a bit guinea into my hand for some few extra comforts, instead o’ which it’s jist to anger me.”
He glued his cheek against the bars and stared at me from head to foot, catching at the last a glance of my fateful shoes. He pointed at them with a rigid finger.
“Man! man!” he cried, “there’s the sign and token o’ the lot o’ ye – the bloody shoon. They may weel be red for him and you that wore them. Red shoon! red shoon!” He stopped suddenly. “After a’,” said he, “I bear ye nae ill-will, though I hae but to pass the word to the warder on the ither side o’ the rails. And oh! abin a’ repent – ” He was off again into one of his blasphemies, for at my elbow now was an old lady who was doubtless come to confirm the conversion of Daniel Risk. I turned to go.
He cast his unaffected eye piously heavenward, and coolly offered up a brief prayer for “this erring young brother determined on the ways of vice and folly.”
It may be scarce credible that I went forth from the condemned cell with the most shaken mind I had had since the day I fled from the moor of Mearns. The streets were thronged with citizens; the castle ramparts rose up white and fine, the bastions touched by sunset fires, a window blazing like a star. Above the muffled valley, clear, silvery, proud, rang a trumpet on the walls, reminding me of many a morning rouse in far Silesia. Was I not better there? Why should I be the sentimental fool and run my head into a noose? Risk, whom I had gone to see in pity, paid me with a vengeance! He had put into the blunt language of the world all the horror I had never heard in words before, though it had often been in my mind. I saw myself for the first time the hunted outlaw, captured at last. “You that’s out there should be in where I am!” It was true! But to sit for weeks in that foul hole within the iron rail, waiting on doom, reflecting on my folks disgraced – I could not bear it!
Risk cured me of my intention to hazard all on the flimsy chance of a Government’s gratitude, and I made up my mind to seek safety and forgetfulness again in flight to another country.
CHAPTER XLIII
BACK TO THE MOORLAND
I had seen yon remnant of a man in the Tolbooth cell, and an immediate death upon the gallows seemed less dreadful than the degradation and the doubt he must suffer waiting weary months behind bars. But gallows or cell was become impossible for the new poltroon of Dan Risk’s making to contemplate with any equanimity, and I made up my mind that America was a country which would benefit greatly by my presence, if I could get a passage there by working for it.
Perhaps I would not have made so prompt a decision upon America had not America implied a Clyde ship, and the Clyde as naturally implied a flying visit to my home in Mearns. Since ever I had set foot on Scotland, and saw Scots reek rise from Scots lums, and blue bonnets on Scots heads, and heard the twang of the true North and kindly from the people about me, I had been wondering about my folk. It was plain they had never got the letter I had sent by Horn, or got it only recently, for he himself had only late got home.
To see the house among the trees, then, to get a reassuring sight of its smoke and learn about my parents, was actually of more importance in my mind than my projected trip to America, though I did not care to confess so much to myself.
I went to Glasgow on the following day; the snow was on the roofs; the students were noisily battling; the bells were cheerfully ringing as on the day with whose description I open this history. I put up at the “Saracen Head,” and next morning engaged a horse to ride to Mearns. In the night there had come a change in the weather; I splashed through slush of melted snow, and soaked in a constant rain, but objected none at all because it gave me an excuse to keep up the collar of my cloak, and pull the brim of my hat well forward on my face and so minimise the risk of identification.
There is the lichened root of an ancient fallen saugh tree by the side of Earn Water between Kirkillstane and Driepps that I cannot till this day look on without a deep emotion. Walter’s bairns have seen me sitting there more than once, and unco solemn so that they have wondered, the cause beyond their comprehension. It was there I drew up my horse to see the house of Kirkillstane from the very spot where I had rambled with my shabby stanzas, and felt the first throb of passion for a woman.
The country was about me familiar in every dyke and tree and eminence; where the water sobbed in the pool it had the accent it had in my dreams; there was a broken branch of ash that trailed above the fall, where I myself had dragged it once in climbing. The smell of moss and rotten leafage in the dripping rain, the eerie aspect of the moorland in the mist, the call of lapwings – all was as I had left it. There was not the most infinite difference to suggest that I had seen another world, and lived another life, and become another than the boy that wandered here.
I rode along the river to find the smoke rising from my father’s house – thank God! but what the better was the outlaw son for that? Dare he darken again the door he had disgraced, and disturb anew the hearts he had made sore?
I pray my worst enemy may never feel torn by warring dictates of the spirit as I was that dreary afternoon by the side of Earn; I pray he may never know the pang with which I decided that old events were best let lie, and that I must be content with that brief glimpse of home before setting forth again upon the roads of dubious fortune. Fortune! Did I not wear just now the very Shoes of Fortune? They had come I knew not whence, from what magic part and artisan of heathendom I could not even guess, to my father’s brother; they had covered the unresting foot of him; to me they had brought their curse of discontent, and so in wearing them I seemed doomed to be the unhappy rover, too.
The afternoon grew loud with wind as I sat my horse beside the increasing water; I felt desolate beyond expression.
“Well, there must be an end of it some way!” I said bitterly, and I turned to go.
The storm opposed me as I cantered over Whig-gitlaw, and won by Brooms, and Bishops Offerance, and Kilree. Shepherds sheltered in the lee of dykes, and women hurried out and shuttered windows. I saw sheep hastening into the angles of the fields, and the wild white sea-gull beating across the sky. The tempest thrashed on me as though it could not have me go too soon from the country of my shame; I broke the horse to gallop, and fields and dykes flew by like things demented.
Then of a sudden the beast grew lame; I searched for a stone or a cast shoe, but neither ailed him, and plainly the ride to town that night was impossible. Where the beast failed was within half a mile of Newton, and at all hazards I decided I must make for the inn there. I felt there were risks of recognition, but I must run them. I led the horse by a side path, and reached the inn no sooner than the darkness that fell that night with unusual suddenness. Lights were in the house, and the sound of rural merriment in the kitchen, where farm lads drank twopenny ale, and sang.
A man – he proved to be the innkeeper – came to my summons with a lantern in his hand, and held it up to see what wayfarer was this in such a night. He saw as little of me as my hat and cloak could reveal, and I saw, what greatly relieved me, that he was not John Warnock, who had tenanted the inn when I left the country, but a new tenant and one unknown to me. He helped me to unsaddle the horse, discovered with me that the lameness would probably succumb to a night in the stall, and unburdened himself to the questions every unknown traveller in the shire of Renfrew may expect.
“You’ll be frae Ayr, maybe, or Irvine?”
No, I was from neither; I was from Glasgow.
“Say ye sae, noo! Dod! it’s nae nicht for travelling and nae wonder your horse is lamed. Ye’ll be for ower Fenwick way, noo, i’ the mornin’?” Nor was I for over Fenwick way in the morning. I was for Glasgow again.
He looked from the corners of his eyes at this oddity who travelled like a shuttle in such weather. I was drenched with rain, and my spatter-dashes, with which I had thought to make up in some degree for the inadequate foot-wear of red shoes on horseback, were foul with clay. He presumed I was for supper?
“No,” I answered; “I’m more in the humour for bed, and I will be obliged if you send to my room for my clothes in a little so that they may be dry by the time I start in the morning, and I shall set out at seven if by that time my horse is recovered.”
I drank a tankard of ale for the good of the house, as we say, during a few minutes in the parlour, making my dripping clothes and a headache the excuse for refusing the proffered hospitality of the kitchen where the ploughboys sang, and then went to the little cam-ceiled room where a hasty bed had been made for me.
The world outside was full of warring winds and plashing rains, into which the yokels went at last reluctantly, and when they were gone I fell asleep, wakening once only for a moment when my wet clothes were being taken from the room.
CHAPTER XLIV
WHEREIN THE SHOES OF FORTUNE BRING ME HOME
I came down from my cam-ceiled room to a breakfast by candle-light in a morning that was yet stormy. The landlord himself waited on me (‘twas no other than Ralph Craig that’s now retired at the Whinnell), and he had a score of apologies for his servant lass that had slept in too long, as he clumsily set a table with his own hand, bringing in its equipment in single pieces.
There was a nervousness in his manner that escaped me for a little in the candle-light, but I saw it finally with some wonder, rueing I had agreed to have breakfast here at all, and had not taken my horse, now recovered of his lameness, and pushed on out of a neighbourhood where I had no right in common sense to be.
If the meal was slow of coming it was hearty enough, though the host embarrassed me too much with his attentions. He was clearly interested in my personality.
“It’s not the first time ye’ve been in the ‘Red Lion,’” said he with an assurance that made me stare.
“And what way should you be thinking that?” I asked, beginning to feel more anxious about my position.
“Oh, jist a surmise o’ my ain,” he answered. “Ye kent your way to the stable in the dark, and then – and then there’s whiles a twang o’ the Mearns in your speech.”
This was certainly coming too close! I hastened through my breakfast, paid my lawing, and ordered out my horse. That took so long that I surmised the man was wilfully detaining me. “This fellow has certainly some project to my detriment,” I told myself, and as speedily as I might got into the saddle. Then he said what left no doubt:
“They’ll be gey glad to see ye at the Hazel Den, Mr. Greig.”
I felt a stound of anguish at the words that might in other circumstances have been true but now were so remote from it.
“You seem to have a very gleg eye in your head,” I said, “and to have a great interest in my own affairs.”
“No offence, Mr. Paul, no offence!” said he civilly, and indeed abashed. “There’s a lassie in the kitchen that was ance your mither’s servant and she kent your shoes.”
“I hope then you’ll say nothing about my being here to any one – for the sake of the servant’s old mistress – that was my mother.”
“That was your mither!” he repeated. “And what for no’ yet? She’ll be prood to see ye hame.”
“Is it well with them up there?” I eagerly asked.
I rode like fury home. The day was come before I reached the dykes of Hazel Den. Smoke was rising from its chimneys; there was a homely sound of lowing cattle, and a horse was saddling for my father who was preparing to ride over to the inn at Newton to capture his errant son. He stood before the door, a little more grey, a little more bent, a little more shrunken than when I had seen him last. When I drew up before him with my hat in my hand and leaped out of the saddle, he scarcely grasped at first the fact that here was his son.
“Father! Father!” I cried to him, and he put his arms about my shoulders.
“You’re there, Paul!” said he at last. “Come your ways in; your dear mother is making your breakfast.”
I could not have had it otherwise – ‘twas the welcome I would have chosen!
His eyes were brimming over; his voice was full of sobs and laughter as he cried “Katrine! Katrine!” and my mother came to throw herself into my arms.
My Shoes of Fortune had done me their one good office; they had brought me home.
And now, my dear David, and Quentin, and Jean, my tale is ended, leaving some folks who figured therein a space with their ultimate fortunes unexplained. There is a tomb in Rome that marks the end of Prince Charles Edward’s wanderings and exploits, ambitions, follies, and passions. Of him and of my countrywoman, Clementina Walkinshaw, you will by-and-by read with understanding in your history-books. She died unhappy and disgraced, yet I can never think of her but as young, beautiful, kind, the fool of her affections, the plaything of Circumstance. Clancarty’s after career I never learned, but Thurot, not long after I escaped from him in Dunkerque, plundered the town of Carrickfergus, in Ireland, and was overtaken by three frigates when he was on his way back to France. His ships were captured and he himself was killed. You have seen Dr. MacKellar here on a visit from his native Badenoch; his pardon from the Government was all I got, or all I wished for, from Mr. Pitt. “And where is Isobel Fortune?” you will ask. You know her best as your grandmother, my wife. My Shoes of Fortune, she will sometimes say, laughing, brought me first and last Miss Fortune; indeed they did! I love them for it, but I love you, too, and hope to keep you from the Greig’s temptation, so they are to the fore no longer.
THE END