by Neil Munro
CHAPTER IV
I COME UPON THE RED SHOES
Uncle Andrew settled for the remainder of his time into our domesticworld at Hazel Den as if his place had been kept warm for him since everhe went away. For the remainder of his time, I say, because he was to bein the clods of Mearns kirkyard before the hips and haws were off thehedges; and I think I someway saw his doom in his ghastly countenancethe first morning he sat at our breakfast table, contrite over his follyof the night before, as you could see, but carrying off the situationwith worldly _sang froid_, and even showing signs of some affection formy father.
His character may be put in two words--he was a lovable rogue; histipsy bitterness to the goodman his brother may be explained almostas briefly: he had had a notion of Katrine Oliver, and had courted herbefore ever she met my father, and he had lost her affection throughhis own folly. Judging from what I would have felt myself in the likecircumstances, his bitterest punishment for a life ill spent must havebeen to see Katrine Oliver's pitying kindness to him now, and the sightof that douce and loving couple finding their happiness in each othermust have been a constant sermon to him upon repentance.
Yet, to tell the truth, I fear my Uncle Andrew was not constitutedfor repentance or remorse. He had slain a man honestly once, and hadsuffered the Plantations, but beyond that (and even that included, ashe must ever insist) he had been guilty of no mean act in all his rovingcareer. Follies--vices--extremes--ay, a thousand of them; but for mosthis conscience never pricked him. On the contrary, he would narrate withgusto the manifold jeopardies his own follies brought him into; hiswan face, nigh the colour of a shroud, would flush, and his eyes dancehumorously as he shocked the table when we sat at meals, our spoonssuspended in the agitation created by his wonderful histories.
Kept to a moderation with the bottle, and with the constant influence ofmy 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 formyself, he brought the element of the unusual and the unexpected to aplace where routine had made me sick of my own society; and thoughthe man in his sober senses knew he was dying on his feet, he was thecheeriest person of our company sequestered so remote in the moors. Itwas a lesson in resignation to see yon merry eyes loweing like lampsover his tombstone cheeks, and hear him crack a joke in the flushed andheaving interludes of his cough.
It was to me he ever directed the most sensational of his extraordinarymemorials. My father did not like it; I saw it in his eye. It wasapparent to me that a remonstrance often hung on the tip of his tongue.He would invent ridiculous and unnecessary tasks to keep me out ofreach of that alluring _raconteur_, and nobody saw it plainer than UncleAndrew, who but laughed with the mischievousness of a boy.
Well, the long and short of it was just what Quentin Greig feared--theSpoiled 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 bendsinister--nine out of ten of that family had travelled that road, thatleads so often to a kistful of sailor's shells and a death with bootson. It was a fate in the blood, like the black hair of us, the mole onthe temple, and the trick of irony. It was that ailment my fatherhad feared for me; it was that kept the household silent upon missingbrothers (they were dead, my uncle told me, in Trincomalee, and inJamaica, and a yard in the Borough of London); it was that inspired thenotion of a lawyer's life for Paul Greig.
Just when I was in the deepmost confidence of Uncle Andrew, who was bythen confined to his bed and suffering the treatment of Doctor Clews,his stories stopped abruptly and he began to lament the wastry of hislife. 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 finallyon 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 overthe very ploys he had a week ago exulted in, I recognised some of mymother's commonest sentiments in his sideways sermon. She had got herquondam 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 ofthe pock-marked tobacco planter when you and the negro lay in the swampfor him?"
He groaned hopelessly.
"A rotten tale, Paul, my lad," said he, never looking me in the face; "Irue the day I was mixed up in that affair."
"But it was a good story so far as it went, no further gone thanWednesday last," I protested.
He laughed at that, and for half an hour he put off the new man ofmy mother's bidding, and we were on the old naughty footing again. Heconcluded by bequeathing to me for the twentieth time the brass-boundchest, and its contents that we had never seen nor could guess thenature of. But now for the first time he let me know what I might expectthere.
"It's not what Quentin might consider much," said he, "for there's not aguelder of money in it, no, nor so little as a groat, for as the world'sdivided ye can't have both the money and the dance, and I was aye thefellow for the dance. There's scarcely anything in it, Paul, but thetrash--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 thepock-marked man."
"Ah! You're there, Greig!" cried the rogue, laughing till his hoast cameto nigh choke him. "Well, the kist's yours, anyway, such as it is; andthere's but one thing in it--to be strict, a pair--that I set any storeby as worth leaving to my nephew."
"It ought to be spurs," said I, "to drive me out of this lamentablecountryside 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 Andrewwas doited at last.
"A pair of shoes, and perhaps in some need of the cobbler, for I haveworn them a good deal since I got them in Madras. They were not new whenI got them, but by the look of them they're not a day older now. Theyhave 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 themthe 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 gratifiedby his gift.
He died next morning. It was Candlemas Day. He went out at last like acrusie wanting oil. In the morning he had sat up in bed to supporridge that, following a practice I had made before his reminiscencesconcluded, I had taken in to him myself. Tremendous long and lean theupper part of him looked, and the cicatrice upon his brow made hisghastliness the more appalling. When he sat against the bolsters hecould 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 higherpart of the country by stress of winter weather, and a couple of mongreldogs keeping him at bay in an angle of the fail dyke.
I have seldom seen a man more vastly moved than Uncle Andrew lookingupon this tragedy of the wilds. He gasped as though his chest wouldcrack, a sweat burst on his face.
"That's--that's the end o't, Paul, my lad!" said he. "Yonder's yourroving uncle, and the tykes have got him cornered at last. No more theheather and the brae; no more--no more--no more--"
Such a change came on him that I ran and cried my mother ben, and sheand father were soon at his bedside.
It was to her he turned his eyes, that had seen so much of the spaciousworld of men and women and all their multifarious interests, great andlittle. They shone with a light of memory and affection, so that I gotthere and then a glimpse of the Uncle Andrew of innocence and the UncleAndrew 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 adoited man's ill
usion, though the look of death was on him; but I stoodrebuked in the frank gaze he gave me of a fuller comprehension thanmine, though he answered me not.
And then he took my father's hand in his other, and to him too he saidfarewell.
"You're there, Quentin!" said he; "and Katrine--Katrine--Katrine choseby far the better man. God be merciful to poor Andy Greig, a sinner."And these were his last words.