The Shoes of Fortune

by Neil Munro

  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 thatseason, and it sang like to burst its heart above the spot where thelad fell with a cry among the rushes. It rose from somewhere in ourneighbourhood, aspiring to the heavens, but chained to earth by itsown song; and even yet I can recall the eerie influence of that strangeconjunction of sin and song as I stood knee-deep in the tangle of themoor 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 replyfrom yon among the rushes. I tried to wet my cracking lips with a tonguelike a cork, and "Davie, oh, Davie, are ye badly hurt?" I cried, in avoice I must have borrowed from ancient time when my forefathers foughtwith the forest terrors.

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

  The bird was high--a spot upon the blue; his song, I am sure, was thesong of his kind, that has charmed lovers in summer fields from oldtime--a melody rapturous, a message like the message of the eveningstar that God no more fondly loves than that small warbler in desertplaces--and yet there and then it deaved me like a cry from hell. Noheavenly message had the lark for me: he flew aloft there into theinvisible, to tell of this deed of mine among the rushes. Not God alonewould 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; thesolitary witness of my crime might spread the hue and cry about theshire; 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 athousand years I scanned the blue for him in vain, yet when I looked atmy 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 itthe confederate of hate; though it, with its duty done, relapsed into aheedless silence, I, that owned it for my instrument, must be wailing inmy breast, torn head to foot with thunders of remorse.

  I raised the hammer, ran a thumb along the flint, seeing somethingfiendish in the jaws that held it; I lifted up the prime-cap, and itseemed some miracle of Satan that the dust I had put there in the peaceof 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 adragon's grin that had seemed ridiculous before, and now seemed to cry"Cain!" Lord! that an instrument like this in an unpractised hand shouldcut off all young Borland's earthly task, end his toil with plough andharrow, 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 ceasehis joke, "I ken ye're only lettin' on, Davie. Get up oot o' that andwe'll cry quits."

  But there was no movement; there was no sound; the tell-tale had theheavens 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 fromthat place. It was not the gallows I thought of (though that too wassometimes in my mind), but of the frightful responsibility I had made myburden, to send a human man before his Maker without a preparation, andmy bullet hole upon his brow or breast, to tell for ever through theroaring ring of all eternity that this was the work of Paul Greig. Therushes of the moor hissed me as I ran blindly through them; the tufts ofheather over Whiggit Knowe caught at me to stop me; the laverock seemedto 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 toEarn-side, where I felt the water crying in its linn would drown thesound of the noisy laverock; and the familiar scene would blot for aspace 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 atme from the innocent waters was the Spoiled Horn who had been reflectedin Isobel's eyes. Over and over again I wet my lips and bathed mytemples; I washed my hands, and there was on the right forefinger a markI bear to this day where the trigger guard of the pistol in the momentsof 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 andwent 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 anincome in the leg of our mare, of Sabbath's sermon, of things that wereas 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 settingthe hue and cry of Paul Greig's crime around the world and up to theThrone itself, and what I was seeing was the vacant moor, now in thedusk, and a lad's remains awaiting their discovery. The victuals chokedme as I pretended to eat; my father noticed nothing, my mother gave aglance, and a fright was in her face.

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

  The evening worship came.

  _"If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost ends ofthe sea."_

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

  When we came to pray and knelt upon the floor, I felt as through my shuteyes that hers were on me even then, exceeding sad and troubled. Theyfollowed 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 whenshe came up after me. She had never done the like before since I was achild.

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

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

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

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

  "Oh, Paul, Paul!" she cried, "I did not like to see you going out inthese 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 differentheart. Mother, mother, the worst ye can guess is no' so bad as the worstye'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 tosmile with a wan face in the candle light.

  "It _was_--poor dear! Am I not in torment when I think that she mustknow it?"

  "I thought it was that that ailed ye, Paul," said she, as if she wererelieved. "Look; I got this a little ago on the bleaching-green--thisscrap of paper in your write and her name upon it. Maybe I should nothave read it." And she handed me part of that ardent ballad I had tornless than an hour ago.

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

  "Oh, Paul, Paul, it cannot be so unco'!" she cried in terror, andclutched 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 andshivering in my room, that I dared not tell her there and then. I saidit was better that both father and she should hear my tale together, andwe went into the room where already he was bedded but not asleep. He satup 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 thetale 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 butdetermined, and then he put his arm about her waist. It seemed like asecond murder to wrench those tender hearts that loved me, but the thingwas bound to do.

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

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