Two days after, theRoi Rougecame to Dunkerque; Horn the seaman went home to Scotland in a vessel out of Leith with a letter in his pocket for my people at Hazel Den, and I did my best for the next fortnight to forget by day the remorse that was my nightmare. To this Captain Thurot and Lord Clancarty, without guessing 'twas a homicide they favoured, zealously helped me.
And then Dunkerque at the moment was sparkling with attractions. Something was in its air to distract every waking hour, the pulse of drums, the sound of trumpets calling along the shores, troops manoeuvring, elation apparent in every countenance. I was Thurot's guest in a lodging over aboulangerieupon the sea front, and at daybreak I would look out from the little window to see regiments of horse and foot go by on their way to an enormous camp beside the old fort of Risebank. Later in the morning I would see the soldiers toiling at the grand sluice for deepening the harbour or repairing the basin, or on the dunes near Graveline manoeuvring under the command of the Prince de Soubise and Count St. Germain. All day the paving thundered with the roll of tumbrels, with the noise of plunging horse; all night the front of theboulangeriewas clamorous with carriages bearing cannon, timber, fascines, gabions, and other military stores.
Thurot, with his ship in harbour, became a man of the town, with ruffled neck- and wrist-bands, the most extravagant of waistcoats, hats laced with point d'Espagne, and up and down Dunkerque he went with a restless foot as if the conduct of the world depended on him. He sent an old person, a reduced gentleman, to me to teach me French that I laboured with as if my life depended on it from a desire to be as soon as possible out of his reverence, for, to come to the point and be done with it, he was my benefactor to the depth of my purse.
Sometimes Lord Clancarty asked me out to adéjeuner. He moved in a society where I met many fellow countrymen—Captain Foley, of Rooth's regiment; Lord Roscommon and his brother young Dillon; Lochgarry, Lieutenant-Colonel of Ogilvie's Corps, among others, and by-and-by I became known favourably in what, if it was not actually the select society of Dunkerque, was so at least in the eyes of a very ignorant young gentleman from the moors of Mearns.
It was so strange a thing as to be almost incredible, but my Uncle Andy's shoes seemed to have some magic quality that brought them for ever on tracks they had taken before, and if my cast of countenance did not proclaim me a Greig wherever I went, the shoes did so. They were a passport to the favour of folks the most divergent in social state—to a poor Swiss who kept the door and attended on the table at Clancarty's (my uncle, it appeared, had once saved his life), and to Soubise himself, who counted my uncle the bravest man and the best mimic he had ever met, and on that consideration alone pledged his influence to find me a post.
You may be sure I did not wear such tell-tale shoes too often. I began to have a freit about them as he had to whom they first belonged, and to fancy them somehow bound up with my fortune.
I put them on only when curiosity prompted me to test what new acquaintances they might make me, and one day I remember I donned them for a party of blades at Lord Clancarty's, the very day indeed upon which the poor Swiss, weeping, told me what he owed to the old rogue with the scarred brow now lying dead in the divots of home.
There was a new addition to the company that afternoon—a priest who passed with the name of Father Hamilton, though, as I learned later, he was formerly Vliegh, a Fleming, born at Ostend, and had been educated partly at the College Major of Louvain and partly in London. He was or had been parish priest of Dixmunde near Ostend, and his most decent memory of my uncle, whom he, too, knew, was a challenge to a drinking-bout in which the thin man of Meams had been several bottles more thirsty than the fat priest of Dixmunde.
He was corpulent beyond belief, with a dewlap like an ox; great limbs, a Gargantuan appetite, and a laugh like thunder that at its loudest created such convulsions of his being as compelled him to unbutton the neck of hissoutane, else he had died of a seizure.
His friends at Lord Clancarty's played upon him a little joke wherein I took an unconscious part. It seemed they had told him Mr. Andrew Greig was not really dead, but back in France and possessed of an elixir of youth which could make the ancient and furrowed hills themselves look like yesterday's creations.
“What! M. Andrew!” he had cried. “An elixir of grease were more in the fellow's line; I have never seen a man's viands give so scurvy a return for the attention he paid them. 'Tis a pole—this M. Andrew—but what a head—what a head!”
“Oh! but 'tis true of the elixir,” they protested; “and he looks thirty years younger; here he comes!”
It was then that I stepped in with the servant bawling my name, and the priest surged to his feet with his face all quivering.
“What! M. Andrew!” he cried; “fattened and five-and-twenty. Holy Mother! It is, then, that miracles are possible? I shall have a hogshead, master, of thine infernal essence and drink away this paunch, and skip anon like to the goats of—of-”
And then his friends burst into peals of laughter as much at my bewilderment as at his credulity, and he saw that it was all a pleasantry.
“Mon Dieu!” he said, sighing like a November forest. “There was never more pestilent gleek played upon a wretched man. Oh! oh! oh! I had an angelic dream for that moment of your entrance, for I saw me again a stripling—a stripling—and the girl's name was—never mind. God rest her! she is under grass in Louvain.”
All the rest of the day—at Clancarty's, at the Café de la Poste, in our walk along the dunes where cannon were being fired at marks well out at sea, this obese cleric scarcely let his eyes off me. He seemed to envy and admire, and then again he would appear to muse upon my countenance, debating with himself as one who stands at a shop window pondering a purchase that may be on the verge of his means.
Captain Thurot observed his interest, and took an occasion to whisper to me.
“Have a care, M. Greig,” said he playfully; “this priest schemes something; that's ever the worst of your Jesuits, and you may swear 'tis not your eternal salvation.”
'Twas that afternoon we went all together to the curious lodging in the Rue de la Boucherie. I remember as it had been yesterday how sunny was the weather, and how odd it seemed to me that there should be a country-woman of my own there.
She was not, as it seems to me now, lovely, though where her features failed of perfection it would beat me to disclose, but there was something inexpressibly fascinating in her—in the mild, kind, melting eyes, and the faint sad innuendo of her smile. She sat at a spinet playing, and for the sake of this poor exile, sang some of the songs we are acquainted with at home. Upon my word, the performance touched me to the core! I felt sick for home: my mother's state, the girl at Kirkillstane, the dead lad on the moor, sounds of Earn Water, clouds and heather on the hill of Ballageich—those mingled matters swept through my thoughts as I sat with these blithe gentlemen, hearkening to a simple Doric tune, and my eyes filled irrestrainably with tears.
Miss Walkinshaw—for so her name was—saw what effect her music had produced; reddened, ceased her playing, took me to the window while the others discussed French poetry, and bade me tell her, as we looked out upon the street, all about myself and of my home. She was, perhaps, ten years my senior, and I ran on like a child.
“The Mearns!” said she. “Oh dear, oh dear! And you come frae the Meams!” She dropped into her Scots that showed her heart was true, and told me she had often had her May milk in my native parish.
“And you maybe know,” said she, flushing, “the toun of Glasgow, and the house of Walkinshaw, my—my father, there?”
I knew the house very well, but no more of it than that it existed.
It was in her eyes the tears were now, talking of her native place, but she quickly changed the topic ere I could learn much about her, and she guessed—with a smile coming through her tears, like a sun through mist—that I must have been in love and wandered in its fever, to be so far from home at my age.
“There was a girl,” I said, my face hot, my heart rapping at the recollection, and someway she knew all about Isobel Fortune in five minutes, while the others in the room debated on so trivial a thing as the songs of the troubadours.
“Isobel Fortune!” she said (and I never thought the name so beautiful as it sounded on her lips, where it lingered like a sweet); “Isobel Fortune; why, it's an omen, Master Greig, and it must be a good fortune. I am wae for the poor lassie that her big foolish lad”—she smiled with bewitching sympathy at me under long lashes—“should be so far away frae her side. You must go back as quick as you can; but stay now, is it true you love her still?”
The woman would get the feeling and the truth from a heart of stone; I only sighed for answer.
“Then you'll go back,” said she briskly, “and it will be Earn-side again and trysts at Ballageich—oh! the name is like a bagpipe air to me!—and you will be happy, and be married and settle down—and—and poor Clemie Walkinshaw will be friendless far away from her dear Scotland, but not forgetting you and your wife.”
“I cannot go back there at all,” I said, with a long face, bitter enough, you may be sure, at the knowledge I had thrown away all that she depicted, and her countenance fell.
“What for no'?” she asked softly.
“Because I fought a duel with the man that Isobel preferred, and—and—killed him!”
She shuddered with a little sucking in of air at her teeth and drew up her shoulders as if chilled with cold.
“Ah, then,” said she, “the best thing's to forget. Are you a Jacobite, Master Greig?”
She had set aside my love affair and taken to politics with no more than a sigh of sympathy, whether for the victim of my jealousy, or Isobel Fortune, or for me, I could not say.
“I'm neither one thing nor another,” said I. “My father is a staunch enough royalist, and so, I daresay, I would be too if I had not got a gliff of bonnie Prince Charlie at the Tontine of Glasgow ten years ago.”
“Ten years ago!” she repeated, staring abstracted out at the window. “Ten years ago! So it was; I thought it was a lifetime since. And what did you think of him?”
Whatever my answer might have been it never got the air, for here Clancarty, who had had a message come to the door for him, joined us at the window, and she turned to him with some phrase about the trampling of troops that passed along the streets.
“Yes,” he said, “the affair marches quickly. Have you heard that England has declared war? And our counter declaration is already on its way across.Pardieu!there shall be matters toward in a month or two and the Fox will squeal. Braddock's affair in America has been the best thing that has happened us in many years.”
Thus he went on with singular elation that did not escape me, though my wits were also occupied by some curious calculations as to what disturbed the minds of Hamilton and of the lady. I felt that I was in the presence of some machinating influences probably at variance, for while Clancarty and Roscommon and Thurot were elate, the priest made only a pretence at it, and was looking all abstracted as if weightier matters occupied his mind, his large fat hand, heavy-ringed, buttressing his dewlap, and Miss Walkinshaw was stealing glances of inquiry at him—glances of inquiry and also of distrust. All this I saw in a mirror over the mantelpiece of the room.
“Sure there's but one thing to regret in it,” cried Clancarty suddenly, stopping and turning to me, “it must mean that we lose Monsieur des Souliers Rouges.Peste!There is always something to worry one about a war!”
“Comment?” said Thurot.
“The deportment,” answered his lordship. “Every English subject has been ordered out of France. We are going to lose not only your company, Father Hamilton, because of your confounded hare-brained scheme for covering all Europe in a glass coach, but our M. Greig must put the Sleeve between him and those best qualified to estimate and esteem his thousand virtues of head and heart For alouisor two I'd take ship with him and fight on the other side. Gad! it would always be fighting anyway, and one would be by one's friend.”
The priest's jaw fell as if my going was a blow to his inmost affections; he turned his face rapidly into shadow; Miss Walkinshaw lost no movement of his; she was watching him as he had been a snake.
“Oh! but it is not necessary that we lose my compatriot so fast as that,” she said. “There are such things as permits, excepting English friends of ours from deportment,—and—and—I fancy I could get one for Mr. Greig.”
In my heart I thanked her for her ready comprehension of my inability to go back to Britain with an easy mind; and I bowed my recognition of her goodness.
She was paying no heed to my politeness; she had again an eye on the priest, who was obviously cheered marvellously by the prospect.
And then we took a dish of tea with her, the lords and Thurot loudly cheerful, Hamilton ruminant and thundering alternately, Miss Walkinshaw showing a score of graces as hostess, myself stimulated to some unusual warmth of spirit as I sat beside her, well-nigh fairly loving her because she was my country-woman and felt so fond about my native Mearns.
Aweek passed with no further incident particularly affecting this history. With my reduced and antique mentor I studiedla 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 commandedtous les gouverneurs et tous les lieutenants-généraux de nos provinces et de nos armées, gouverneurs particuliers et commandants de nos villes, places et troupesto 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 abottinelike 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 inbooks: God's pity on her! she was not bad; she was the very football offate, and a heart of the yellow gold. If I was warlock or otherwise hadcharms, I would put back the dial two score years and wrench her fromher chains.O waly, waly up the bank,O waly, waly doon the brae.And waly, waly yon burn-side,Where I and my love wont to gae.I leaned my back unto an aik,I thocht it was a trusty tree,But first it bowed and syne it brak,Sae my true love did lichtly me.
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.”
“Thankyou, 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, thoucroque 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 theirprotégéin 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 heardJe t'aimein 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 ofcrapauds. “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 frompetit levertill—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 hiscroque-mortcountenance, 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.
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 theboutique. '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 anennuielse. 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.
“No, faith! but 'tis a man's, Master Greig, and I have been happy with it. Touching our fair friend, I may say that, much as I admire her, I agree with some others that ours were a luckier cause without her. Gad! the best thing you could do, Mr. Greig, would be to marry her yourself and take her back with you to Scotland.”
“What! byway of Paris in Father Hamilton's glass coach,” I said, bantering to conceal my confusion at such a notion.
“H'm,” said he. “Father Hamilton and the lady are a pair.” He walked a little up and down the room as if he were in a quandary. “A pair,” he resumed. “I fancied I could see to the very centre of the Sphinx itself, for all men are in ourselves if we only knew it, till I came upon this Scotswoman and this infernal Flemish-English priest of Dix-munde. Somehow, for them Antoine Thurot has not the key in himself yet. Still, 'twill arrive, 'twill arrive! I like the lady—and yet I wish she were a thousand miles away; I like the man too, but a Jesuit is too many men at once to be sure of; and, Gad! I can scarcely sleep at nights for wondering what he may be plotting. This grand tour of his-”
“Stop, stop!” I cried, in a fear that he might compromise himself in an ignorance of my share in the tour in question; “I must tell you that I am going with Father Hamilton as his secretary, although it bothers me to know what scrivening is to be accomplished in a glass coach. Like enough I am to be no more, in truth, than the gentleman's companion or courier, and it is no matter so long as I am moving.”
“Indeed, and is it so?” cried Captain Thurot, stopping as if he had been shot. “And how happens it that this priest is willing to take you, that are wholly a foreigner and a stranger to the country?”
“Miss Walkinshaw recommended me,” said I.
“Oh!” he cried, “you have not been long of getting into your excellent countrywoman's kind favour. Is it that Tony Thurot has been doing the handsome by an ingrate? No, no, Monsieur, that were a monstrous innuendo, for the honour has been all mine. But that Miss Walkinshaw should be on such good terms with the priest as to trouble with the provision of his secretary is opposed to all I had expected of her. Why, she dislikes the man, or I'm a stuffed fish.”
“Anyhow, she has done a handsome thing by me,” said I. “It is no wonder that so good a heart as hers should smother its repugnances (and the priest is a fat sow, there is no denying) for the sake of a poor lad from its own country. You are but making it the plainer that I owe her more than at first I gave her credit for.”
“Bless me, here's gratitude!” cried the captain, laughing at my warmth. “Mademoiselle Walkinshaw has her own plans; till now, I fancied them somewhat different from Hamilton's, but more fool I to fancy they were what they seemed! All that, my dear lad, need not prevent your enjoying your grand tour with the priest, who has plenty of money and the disposition to spend it like a gentleman.”
Finally I went to my Lord Clancarty, for it will be observed that I had still no hint as to the origin of the lady who was so good a friend of mine. Though the last thing in the world I should have done was to pry into her affairs for the indulgence of an idle curiosity, I would know the best of her before the time came to say farewell, and leave of her with me no more than a memory.
The earl was at the Café du Soleil d'Or, eating mussels on the terrace and tossing the empty shells into the gutter what time he ogled passing women and exchanged levitous repartee with some other frequenters of the place.
“Egad, Paul,” he cried, meeting me with effusion, “'tis said there is one pearl to be found for every million mussels; but here's a pearl come to me in the midst of a single score. An Occasion, lad; I sat at the dice last night till a preposterous hour this morning, and now I have a headache like the deuce and a thirst to take the Baltic. I must have the tiniest drop, and on an Occasion too.Voilà! Gaspard, une autre bouteille.”
He had his bottle, that I merely made pretence to help him empty, and I had my precognition.
But it came to little in the long run. Oh yes, he understood my interest in the lady (with rakish winking); 'twas a delicious creature for all itshauteurwhen one ventured a gallantry, but somehow no particular friend to the Earl of Clancarty, who, if she only knew it, was come of as noble a stock as any rotten Scot ever went unbreeched; not but what (this with a return of the naturally polite man) there were admirable and high-bred people of that race, as instance my Uncle Andrew and myself. But was there any reason why such a man as Charlie Stuart should be King of Ireland? “I say, Greig, blister the old Chevalier and his two sons! There is not a greater fumbler on earth than this sotted person, who has drunk the Cause to degradation and would not stir a hand to serve me and my likes, that are, begad! the fellow's betters.”
“But all this,” said I, “has little to do with Miss Walkinshaw. I have nothing to say of the Prince, who may be all you say, though that is not the repute he has in Scotland.”
“Bravo, Mr. Greig!” cried his lordship. “That is the tone if you would keep in the lady's favour. Heaven knows she has little reason to listen to praise of such a creature, but, then, women are blind. She loves not Clancarty, as I have said; but, no matter, I forgive her that; 'tis well known 'tis because I cannot stomach her prince.”
“And yet,” said I, “you must interest yourself in these Jacobite affairs and mix with all that are here of that party.”
“Faith and I do,” he confessed heartily. “What! am I to be a mole and stay underground? A man must have his diversion, and though I detest the Prince I love his foolish followers. Do you know what, Mr. Greig? 'Tis the infernal irony of things in this absurd world that the good fellows, the bloods, the men of sensibilities must for ever be wrapped up in poor mad escapades and emprises. And a Clancarty is ever of such a heart that the more madcap the scheme the more will he dote on it.”
A woman passing in a chair at this moment looked in his direction; fortunately, otherwise I was condemned to a treatise on life and pleasure.
“Egad!” he cried, “there's a face that's like a line of song,” and he smiled at her with unpardonable boldness as it seemed to me, a pleasant pucker about his eyes, a hint of the good comrade in his mouth.
She flushed like wine and tried to keep from smiling, but could not resist, and smiling she was borne away.
“Do you know her, my lord?” I could not forbear asking.
“Is it know her?” said he. “Devil a know, but 'tis a woman anyhow, and a heart at that. Now who the deuce can she be?” And he proceeded, like a true buck, to fumble with the Mechlin of his fall and dust his stockings in an airy foppish manner so graceful that I swear no other could have done the same so well.
“Now this Miss Walkinshaw—” I went on, determined to have some satisfaction from my interview.
“Confound your Miss Walkinshaw, by your leave, Mr. Greig,” he interrupted. “Can you speak of Miss Walkinshaw when the glory of the comet is still trailing in the heavens? And—hum!—I mind me of a certain engagement, Mr. Greig,” he went on hurriedly, drawing a horologe from his fob and consulting it with a frowning brow. “In the charm of your conversation I had nigh forgot, soadieu, adieu, mon ami!”
He gave me the tips of his fingers, and a second later he was gone, stepping down the street with a touch of the minuet, tapping his legs with his cane, his sword skewering his coat-skirts, all the world giving him the cleanest portion of the thoroughfare and looking back after him with envy and admiration.