The Shoes of Fortune

by Neil Munro

  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 Iwent to the trance door and looked out at the stretching moorlands litby an enormous moon that rose over Cathkin Braes, and an immensity ofstars. For the first time in all my life I realised the heedlessness ofnature in human affairs the most momentous. For the moon swung up serenebeyond expression; the stars winked merrily: a late bird glid among thebushes and perched momentarily on a bough of ash to pipe briefly almostwith the passion of the spring. But not the heedlessness of natureinfluenced me so much as the barren prospect of the world that the moonand stars revealed. There was no one out there in those deep spaces ofdarkness I could claim as friend or familiar. Where was I to go? Whatwas I to do? Only the beginnings of schemes came to me--schemesof concealment and disguise, of surrender even--but the last to bedismissed as soon as it occurred to me, for how could I leave this housethe bitter bequest of a memory of the gallows-tree?

  Only the beginnings, I say, for every scheme ran tilt against theobvious 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 ofeither.

  I could not have stood very long there when my father came out, his facelike clay, and aged miraculously, and beckoned me to the parlour.

  "Your mother--my wife," said he, "is very ill, and I am sending for thedoctor. The horse is yoking. There is another woman in Driepps who--Godhelp her!--will be no better this night, but I wish in truth her casewas ours, and that it was you who lay among the heather."

  He began pacing up and down the floor, his eyes bent, his handscontinually wringing, his heart bursting, as it were, with sighs and thedry sobs of the utmost wretchedness. As for me, I must have been cleangyte (as the saying goes), for my attention was mostly taken up with thetassel of his nightcap that bobbed grotesquely on his brow. I had notseen 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 andtried to shake me in an anger, but I felt it no more than I had been astone.

  "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 momentoushour to speak of such a thing to him.

  "A girl!" he repeated, tossing up his hands. "Keep us! Hoo lang are yeoot o' daidlies? Well! well!" he went on, subduing himself and preparedto listen. I wished the tassel had been any other colour than crimson,and hung fairer on the middle of his forehead; it seemed to fascinateme. 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 thefloor, and hearken for a sound from the room where she was quarteredwith 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 abrief abstract.

  How that I had met young Borland coming down the breast of the brae atKirkillstane last night and--

  "Last night!" he cried. "Are ye havering? I saw ye go to your bed atten, and your boots were in the kitchen."

  It was so, I confessed. I had gone to my room but not to bed, and hadslipped out by the window when the house was still, with Uncle Andrew'sshoes.

  "Oh, lad!" he cried, "it's Andy's shoes you stand in sure enough, forI have seen him twenty years syne in the plight that you are in thisnight. Merciful heaven! what dark blotch is in the history of thisfamily of ours that it must ever be embroiled in crimes of passion andcome continually to broken ends of fortune? I have lived stark honestand humble, fearing the Lord; the covenants have I kept, and still andon 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 aboyish 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 kneesthat's ben there, and it might have been but yesterday your greeting inthe night wakened me to mourn and ponder on your fate." And how Borland,divining my object there, and himself new out triumphant from thatcheerful house of many daughters, made his contempt for the Spoiled Horntoo apparent.

  "You walked to the trough-stane when you were a twelvemonth old," saidmy father with the irrelevance of great grief, as if he recalled a deadson's infancy.

  And how, maddened by some irony of mine, he had struck a blow uponmy chest, and so brought my challenge to something more serious andgentlemanly than a squalid brawl with fists upon the highway.

  I stopped my story; it seemed useless to be telling it to one so muchpreoccupied 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 thelong night through, torn by grief and anger, jealousy and distress. Andhow evading the others of the household as best I could that day, Ihad in the afternoon at the hour appointed gone out with Uncle Andrew'spistol.

  My father moaned--a waefu' sound!

  And found young Borland up on the moor before me with such anotherweapon, his face red byordinary, his hands and voice trembling withpassion.

  "Poor lad, poor lad!" my father cried blurting the sentiment as he hadbeen a bairn.

  How we tossed a coin to decide which should be the first to fire, andBorland had won the toss, and gone to the other end of our twenty paceswith vulgar menaces and "Spoiled Horn" the sweetest of his epithets.

  "Poor lad! he but tried to bluster down the inward voice that told himthe folly o't," said father.

  And how Borland had fired first. The air was damp. The sound was like aslamming 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 thepistol 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 alongthe barrel: the flint flashed; the prime missed fire, and I was notsorry, but Borland cried 'Spoiled Horn' braggingly, and I cocked againas fast as I could, and blindly jerked the trigger. I never thought ofstriking him. He fell with one loud cry among the rushes."

  "Murder, by God!" cried my father, and he relapsed into a chair, hisbody all convulsed with horror.

  I had told him all this as if I had been in a delirium, or as if it werea tale out of a book, and it was only when I saw him writhing in hischair and the tassel shaking over his eyes, I minded that the murdererwas me. I made for the door; up rose my father quickly and asked me whatI meant to do.

  I confessed I neither knew nor cared.

  "You must thole your assize," said he, and just as he said it theclatter of the mare's hoofs sounded on the causey of the yard, and hemust have minded suddenly for what object she was saddled there.

  "No, no," said he, "you must flee the country. What right have you tomake 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 meantSandy to send the doctor from the Mearns, but you can do that. Bid himcome here as fast as he can."

  "And must I come back with the mare?" I asked, reckless what he mightsay to that, though my life depended on it.

  "For the sake of your mother," he answered, "I would rather never seteyes 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.

  067]

  Ten minutes later I was on the mare,
and galloping, for all her ailingleg, from Hazel Den as if it were my own loweing conscience. I rousedDr. Clews at the Mearns, and gave him my father's message. "Man," saidhe, holding his chamber light up to my face, "man, ye're as gash as aghaist yersel'."

  "I may well be that," said I, and off I set, with some of Uncle Andy'sold experience in my mind, upon a ride across broad Scotland.