The Shoes of Fortune

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.

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.