The Shoes of 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.

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?”