The funeral was over before I cared to examine my bequest, and then I went to it with some reluctance, for if a pair of shoes was the chief contents of the brass-bound chest, there was like to be little else except the melancholy relics of a botched life. It lay where he left it on the night he came—under the foot of his bed—and when I lifted the lid I felt as if I was spying upon a man through a keyhole. Yet, when I came more minutely to examine the contents, I was disappointed that at the first reflection nothing was there half so pregnant as his own most casual tale to rouse in me the pleasant excitation of romance.
A bairn's caul—that sailor's trophy that has kept many a mariner from drowning only that he might die a less pleasant death; a broken handcuff, whose meaning I cared not to guess at; a pop or pistol; a chap-book of country ballads, that possibly solaced his exile from the land they were mostly written about; the batters of a Bible, with nothing between them but his name in his mother's hand on the inside of the board; a traveller's log or itinerary, covering a period of fifteen years, extremely minute in its detail and well written; a broken sixpence and the pair of shoes.
The broken sixpence moved my mother to tears, for she had had the other half twenty years ago, before Andrew Greig grew ne'er-do-weel; the shoes failed to rouse in her or in my father any interest whatever. If they could have guessed it, they would have taken them there and then and sunk them in the deepest linn of Earn.
There was little kenspeckle about them saving their colour, which was a dull dark red. They were of the most excellent material, with a great deal of fine sewing thrown away upon them in parts where it seems to me their endurance was in no wise benefited, and an odd pair of silver buckles gave at your second glance a foreign look to them.
I put them on at the first opportunity: they fitted me as if my feet had been moulded to them, and I sat down to the study of the log-book. The afternoon passed, the dusk came. I lit a candle, and at midnight, when I reached the year of my uncle's escape from the Jesuits of Spain, I came to myself gasping, to find the house in an alarm, and that lanthorns were out about Earn Water looking for me, while all the time I wasperduin the dead uncle's chamber in the baron's wing, as we called it, of Hazel Den House. I pretended I had fallen asleep; it was the first and the last time I lied to my mother, and something told me she knew I was deceiving her. She looked at the red shoes on my feet.
“Ugly brogues!” said she; “it's a wonder to me you would put them on your feet. You don't know who has worn them.”
“They were Uncle Andy's,” said I, complacently looking at them, for they fitted like a glove; the colour was hardly noticeable in the evening, and the buckles were most becoming.
“Ay! and many a one before him, I'm sure,” said she, with distaste in her tone, “I don't think them nice at all, Paul,” and she shuddered a little.
“That's but a freit,” said I; “but it's not likely I'll wear much of such a legacy.” I went up and left them in the chest, and took the diary into my own room and read Uncle Andrew's marvellous adventures in the trade of rover till it was broad daylight.
When I had come to the conclusion it seemed as if I had been in the delirium of a fever, so tempestuous and unreal was that memoir of a wild loose life. The sea was there, buffeting among the pages in rollers and breakers; there were the chronicles of a hundred ports, with boozing kens and raving lazarettos in them; far out isles and cays in nameless oceans, and dozing lagoons below tropic skies; a great clash of weapons and a bewildering deal of political intrigue in every part of the Continent from Calais to Constantinople. My uncle's narrative in life had not hinted at one half the marvel of his career, and I read his pages with a rapture, as one hears a noble piece of music, fascinated to the uttermost, and finding no moral at the end beyond that the world we most of us live in with innocence and ignorance is a crust over tremendous depths. And then I burned the book. It went up in a grey smoke on the top of the fire that I had kept going all night for its perusal; and the thing was no sooner done than I regretted it, though the act was dictated by the seemly enough idea that its contents would only distress my parents if they came to their knowledge.
For days—for weeks—for a season—I went about, my head humming with Uncle Andy's voice recounting the most stirring of his adventures as narrated in the log-book. I had been infected by almost his first words the night he came to Hazel Den House, and made a magic chant of the mere names of foreign peoples; now I was fevered indeed; and when I put on the red shoes (as I did of an evening, impelled by some dandyism foreign to my nature hitherto), they were like the seven-league boots for magic, as they set my imagination into every harbour Uncle Andy had frequented and made me a guest at every inn where he had met his boon companions.
I was wearing them the next time I went on my excursion to Earn side and there met Isobel Fortune, who had kept away from the place since I had smiled at my discovery of her tryst with Hervey's “Meditations.” She came upon me unexpectedly, when the gentility of my shoes and the recollection of all that they had borne of manliness was making me walk along the road with a very high head and an unusually jaunty step.
She seemed struck as she came near, with her face displaying her confusion, and it seemed to me she was a new woman altogether—at least, not the Isobel I had been at school with and seen with an indifferent eye grow up like myself from pinafores. It seemed suddenly scandalous that the like of her should have any correspondence with so ill-suited a lover as David Borland of the Dreipps.
For the first time (except for the unhappy introduction of Hervey's “Meditations”) we stopped to speak to each other. She was the most bewitching mixture of smiles and blushes, and stammering now and then, and vastly eager to be pleasant to me, and thinks I, “My lass, you're keen on trysting when it's with Borland.”
The very thought of the fellow in that connection made me angry in her interest; and with a mischievous intention of spoiling his sport if he hovered, as I fancied, in the neighbourhood, or at least of delaying his happiness as long as I could, I kept the conversation going very blithe indeed.
She had a laugh, low and brief, and above all sincere, which is the great thing in laughter, that was more pleasant to hear than the sound of Earn in its tinkling hollow among the ferns: it surprised me that she should favour my studied and stupid jocosities with it so frequently. Here was appreciation! I took, in twenty minutes, a better conceit of myself, than the folks at home could have given me in the twelve months since I left the college, and I'll swear to this date 'twas the consciousness of my fancy shoes that put me in such good key.
She saw my glance to them at last complacently, and pretended herself to notice them for the first time.
She smiled—little hollows came near the corners of her lips; of a sudden I minded having once kissed Mistress Grant's niece in a stair-head frolic in Glasgow High Street, and the experience had been pleasant enough.
“They're very nice,” said Isobel.
“They're all that,” said I, gazing boldly at her dimples. She flushed and drew in her lips.
“No, no!” I cried, ”'twas not them I was thinking of; but their neighbours. I never saw you had dimples before.”
At that she was redder than ever.
“I could not help that, Paul,” said she; “they have been always there, and you are getting very audacious. I was thinking of your new shoes.”
“How do you know they're new?”
“I could tell,” said she, “by the sound of your footstep before you came in sight.”
“It might not have been my footstep,” said I, and at that she was taken back.
“That is true,” said she, hasty to correct herself. “I only thought it might be your footstep, as you are often this way.”
“It might as readily have been David Borland's. I have seen him about here.” I watched her as closely as I dared: had her face changed, I would have felt it like a blow.
“Anyway, they're very nice, your new shoes,” said she, with a marvellous composure that betrayed nothing.
“They were uncle's legacy,” I explained, “and had travelled far in many ways about the world; far—and fast.”
“And still they don't seem to be in such a hurry as your old ones,” said she, with a mischievous air. Then she hastened to cover what might seem a rudeness. “Indeed, they're very handsome, Paul, and become you very much, and—and—and—”
“They're called the Shoes of Sorrow; that's the name my uncle had for them,” said I, to help her to her own relief.
“Indeed, and I hope it may be no more than a by-name,” she said gravely.
The day had the first rumour of spring: green shoots thrust among the bare bushes on the river side, and the smell of new turned soil came from a field where a plough had been feiring; above us the sky was blue, in the north the land was pleasantly curved against silver clouds.
And one small bird began to pipe in a clump of willows, that showered a dust of gold upon us when the little breeze came among the branches. I looked at all and I looked at Isobel Fortune, so trim and bonny, and it seemed there and then good to be a man and my fortunes all to try.
“Sorrow here or sorrow there, Isobel,” I said, “they are the shoes to take me away sooner or later from Hazel Den.”
She caught my meaning with astounding quickness.
“Are you in earnest?” she asked soberly, and I thought she could not have been more vexed had it been David Borland.
“Another year of this.” said I, looking at the vacant land, “would break my heart.”
“Indeed, Paul, and I thought Earn-side was never so sweet as now,” said she, vexed like, as if she was defending a companion.
“That is true, too,” said I, smiling into the very depths of her large dark eyes, where I saw a pair of Spoiled Horns as plainly as if I looked in sunny weather into Linn of Earn. “That is true, too. I have never been better pleased with it than to-day. But what in the world's to keep me? It's all bye with the college—at which I'm but middling well pleased; it's all bye with the law—for which thanks to Heaven! and, though they seem to think otherwise at Hazel Den House, I don't believe I've the cut of a man to spend his life among rowting cattle and dour clay land.”
“I daresay not; it's true,” said she stammeringly, with one fast glance that saw me from the buckles of my red shoes to the underlids of my eyes. For some reason or other she refused to look higher, and the distant landscape seemed to have charmed her after that. She drummed with a toe upon the path; she bit her nether lip; upon my word, the lass had tears at her eyes! I had, plainly, kept her long enough from her lover. “Well, it's a fine evening; I must be going,” said I stupidly, making a show at parting, and an ugly sense of annoyance with David Borland stirring in my heart. “But it will rain before morning,” said she, making to go too, but always looking to the hump of Dungoyne that bars the way to the Hielands. “I think, after all, Master Paul, I liked the old shoon better than the new ones.”
“Do you say so?” I asked, astonished at the irrelevance that came rapidly from her lips, as if she must cry it out or choke. “And how comes that?”
“Just because—” said she, and never a word more, like a woman, nor fair good-e'en nor fair good-day to ye, but off she went, and I was the stirk again.
I looked after her till she went out of sight, wondering what had been the cause of her tirravee. She fair ran at the last, as if eager to get out of my sight; and when she disappeared over the brae that rose from the river-side there was a sense of deprivation within me. I was clean gone in love and over the lugs in it with Isobel Fortune.
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.
“Itwas—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!”
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.
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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.
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?”
“This is no' your quarter-deck, man, if ye were sober enough to ken it,” said I; “and I'm no linen-draper from Fife or anywhere else.”
And then the brute, with his hands thrust to the depth of his pockets, staggered me as if he had done it with a blow of his fist.
“No,” said he, with a very cunning tone, “ye're no linen-draper perhaps, but—ye're maybe no sae decent a man, young Greig.”
It was impossible for me to conceal even from this tipsy rogue my astonishment and alarm at this. It seemed to me the devil himself must be leagued against me in the cause of justice. A cold sweat came on my face and the palms of my hands. I opened my mouth and meant to give him the lie but I found I dare not do so in the presence of what seemed a miracle of heaven.
“How do you ken my name's Greig?” I asked at the last.
“Fine that,” he made answer, with a grin; “and there's mony an odd thing else I ken.”
“Well, it's no matter,” said I, preparing to quit him, but in great fear of what the upshot might be; “I'm for off, anyway.”
By this time it was obvious that he was not so drunk as I thought him at first, and that in temper and tact he was my match even with the glass in him. “Do ye ken what I would be doing if I was you?” said he seemingly determined not to let me depart like that, for he took a step or two after me.
I made no reply, but quickened my pace and after me he came, lurching and catching at my arm; and I mind to this day the roll of him gave me the impression of a crab.
“If it's money ye want-” I said at the end of my patience.
“Curse your money!” he cried, pretending to spit the insult from his mouth. “Curse your money; but if I was you, and a weel-kent skipper like Dan Risk—like Dan Risk of theSeven Sisters—made up to me out of a redeeculous good nature and nothing else, I would gladly go and splice the rope with him in the nearest ken.”
“Go and drink with yourself, man,” I cried; “there's the money for a chappin of ate, and I'll forego my share of it.”
I could have done nothing better calculated to infuriate him. As I held out the coin on the palm of my hand he struck it up with an oath and it rolled into the syver. His face flamed till the neck of him seemed a round of seasoned beef.
“By the Rock o' Bass!” he roared, “I would clap ye in jyle for less than your lousy groat.”
Ah, then, it was in vain I had put the breadth of Scotland between me and that corpse among the rushes: my heart struggled a moment, and sank as if it had been drowned in bilge. I turned on the man what must have been a gallows face, and he laughed, and, gaining his drunken good nature again he hooked me by the arm, and before my senses were my own again he was leading me down the street and to the harbour. I had never a word to say.
The port, as I tell, was swathed in the haar of the east, out of which tall masts rose dim like phantom spears; the clumsy tarred bulwarks loomed like walls along the quay, and the neighbourhood was noisy with voices that seemed unnatural coming out of the haze. Mariners were hanging about the sheds, and a low tavern belched others out to keep them company. Risk made for the tavern, and at that I baulked.
“Oh, come on!” said he. “If I'm no' mistaken Dan Risk's the very man ye're in the need of. You're wanting out of Scotland, are ye no'?”
“More than that; I'm wanting out of myself,” said I, but that seemed beyond him.
“Come in anyway, and we'll talk it over.”
That he might help me out of the country seemed possible if he was not, as I feared at first, some agent of the law and merely playing with me, so I entered the tavern with him.
“Two gills to the coffin-room, Mrs. Clerihew,” he cried to the woman in the kitchen. “And slippy aboot it, if ye please, for my mate here's been drinking buttermilk all his life, and ye can tell't in his face.”
“I would rather have some meat,” said I.
“Humph!” quo' he, looking at my breeches. “A lang ride!” He ordered the food at my mentioning, and made no fuss about drinking my share of the spirits as well as his own, while I ate with a hunger that was soon appeased, for my eye, as the saying goes, was iller to satisfy than my appetite.
He sat on the other side of the table in the little room that doubtless fairly deserved the name it got of coffin, for many a man, I'm thinking, was buried there in his evil habits; and I wondered what was to be next.
“To come to the bit,” said the at last, looking hard into the bottom of his tankard in a way that was a plain invitation to buy more for him. “To come to the bit, you're wanting out of the country?”
“It's true,” said I; “but how do you know? And how do you know my name, for I never saw you to my knowledge in all my life before?”
“So much the worse for you; I'm rale weel liked by them that kens me. What would ye give for a passage to Nova Scotia?”
“It's a long way,” said I, beginning to see a little clearer.
“Ay,” said he, “but I've seen a gey lang rope too, and a man danglin' at the end of it.”
Again my face betrayed me. I made no answer.
“I ken all aboot it,” he went on. “Your name's Greig; ye're from a place called the Hazel Den at the other side o' the country; ye've been sailing wi' a stiff breeze on the quarter all night, and the clime o' auld Scotland's one that doesna suit your health, eh? What's the amount?” said he, and he looked towards my pocket “Could we no' mak' it halfers?”
“Five pounds,” said I, and at that he looked strangely dashed.
“Five pounds,” he repeated incredulously. “It seems to have been hardly worth the while.” And then his face changed, as if a new thought had struck him. He leaned over the table and whispered with the infernal tone of a confederate, “Doused his glim, eh?” winking with his hale eye, so that I could not but shiver at him, as at the touch of slime.
“I don't understand,” said I.
“Do ye no'?” said he, with a sneer; “for a Greig ye're mighty slow in the uptak'. The plain English o' that, then, is that ye've killed a man. A trifle like that ance happened to a Greig afore.”
“What's your name?” I demanded.
“Am I no tellin' ye?” said he shortly. “It's just Daniel Risk; and where could you get a better? Perhaps ye were thinkin' aboot swappin' names wi' me; and by the Bass, it's Dan's family name would suit very weel your present position,” and the scoundrel laughed at his own humour.
“I asked because I was frightened it might be Mahoun,” said I. “It seems gey hard to have ridden through mire for a night and a day, and land where ye started from at the beginning. And how do ye ken all that?”
“Oh!” he said, “kennin's my trade, if ye want to know. And whatever way I ken, ye needna think I'm the fellow to make much of a sang aboot it. Still and on, the thing's frowned doon on in this country, though in places I've been it would be coonted to your credit. I'll take anither gill; and if ye ask me, I would drench the butter-milk wi' something o' the same, for the look o' ye sittin' there's enough to gie me the waterbrash. Mrs. Clerihew—here!” He rapped loudly on the table, and the drink coming in I was compelled again to see him soak himself at my expense. He reverted to my passage from the country, and “Five pounds is little enough for it,” said he; “but ye might be eking it oot by partly working your passage.”
“I didn't say I was going either to Nova Scotia or with you,” said I, “and I think I could make a better bargain elsewhere.”
“So could I, maybe,” said he, fuming of spirits till I felt sick. “And it's time I was doin' something for the good of my country.” With that he rose to his feet with a look of great moral resolution, and made as if for the door, but by this time I understood him better.
“Sit down, ye muckle hash!” said I, and I stood over him with a most threatening aspect.
“By the Lord!” said he, “that's a Greig anyway!”
“Ay!” said I. “ye seem to ken the breed. Can I get another vessel abroad besides yours?”
“Ye can not,” said he, with a promptness I expected, “unless ye wait on theSea Pyat. She leaves for Jamaica next Thursday; and there's no' a spark of the Christian in the skipper o' her, one Macallum from Greenock.”
For the space of ten minutes I pondered over the situation. Undoubtedly I was in a hole. This brute had me in his power so long as my feet were on Scottish land, and he knew it. At sea he might have me in his power too, but against that there was one precaution I could take, and I made up my mind.
“I'll give you four pounds—half at leaving the quay and the other half when ye land me.”
“My conscience wadna' aloo me,” protested the rogue; but the greed was in his face, and at last he struck my thumb on the bargain, and when he did that I think I felt as much remorse at the transaction as at the crime from whose punishment I fled.
“Now,” said I, “tell me how you knew me and heard about—about—”
“About what?” said he, with an affected surprise. “Let me tell ye this, Mr. Greig, or whatever your name may be, that Dan Risk is too much of the gentleman to have any recollection of any unpleasantness ye may mention, now that he has made the bargain wi' ye. I ken naethin' aboot ye, if ye please: whether your name's Greig or Mackay or Habbie Henderson, it's new to me, only ye're a likely lad for a purser's berth in theSeven Sisters.” And refusing to say another word on the topic that so interested me, he took me down to the ship's side, where I found theSeven Sisterswas a brigantine out of Hull, sadly in the want of tar upon her timbers and her mainmast so decayed and worm-eaten that it sounded boss when I struck it with my knuckles in the by-going.
Risk saw me doing it. He gave an ugly smile.
“What do ye think o' her? said he, showing me down the companion.
“Mighty little,” I told him straight. “I'm from the moors,” said I, “but I've had my feet on a sloop of Ayr before now; and by the look of this craft I would say she has been beeking in the sun idle till she rotted down to the garboard strake.”
He gave his gleed eye a turn and vented some appalling oaths, and wound up with the insult I might expect—namely, that drowning was not my portion.
“There was some brag a little ago of your being a gentleman,” said I, convinced that this blackguard was to be treated to his own fare if he was to be got on with at all. “There's not much of a gentleman in the like of that.”
At this he was taken aback. “Well,” said he, “don't you cross my temper; if my temper's crossed it's gey hard to keep up gentility. The ship's sound enough, or she wouldn't be half a dizen times round the Horn and as weel kent in Halifax as one o' their ain dories. She's guid enough for your—for our business, if ye please, Mr. Greig; and here's my mate Murchison.”
Another tarry-breeks of no more attractive aspect came down the companion.
“Here's a new hand for ye,” said the skipper humorously.
The mate looked me up and down with some contempt from his own height of little more than five feet four, and peeled an oilskin coat off him. I was clad myself in a good green coat and breeches with fine wool rig-and-fur hose, and the buckled red shoon and the cock of my hat I daresay gave me the look of some importance in tarry-breeks' eyes. At any rate, he did not take Risk's word for my identity, but at last touched his hat with awkward fingers after relinquishing his look of contempt.
“Mr. Jamieson?” said he questioningly, and the skipper by this time was searching in a locker for a bottle of rum he said he had there for the signing of agreements. “Mr. Jamieson,” said the mate, “I'm glad to see ye. The money's no; enough for the job, and that's letting ye know. It's all right for Dan here wi' neither wife nor family, but—”
“What's that, ye idiot?” cried Risk turning about in alarm. “Do ye tak' this callan for the owner? I tell't ye he was a new hand.”
“A hand!” repeated Murchison, aback and dubious.
“Jist that; he's the purser.”
Murchison laughed. “That's a new ornament on the auld randy; he'll be to keep his keekers on the manifest, like?” said he as one who cracks a good joke. But still and on he scanned me with a suspicious eye, and it was not till Risk had taken him aside later in the day and seemingly explained, that he was ready to meet me with equanimity. By that time I had paid the skipper his two guineas, for the last of his crew was on board, every man Jack of them as full as the Baltic, and staggering at the coamings of the hatches not yet down, until I thought half of them would finally land in the hold.