The Shoes of Fortune

You can fancy a raw lad, untutored and untravelled, fresh from the plough-tail, as it were, was vastly tickled at this introduction to the genteel world. I was no longer the shivering outlaw, the victim of a Risk. I was honoured more or less for the sake of my uncle (whose esteem in this quarter my father surely would have been surprised at), and it seemed as though my new life in a new country were opening better than I had planned myself. I blessed my shoes – the Shoes of Sorrow – and for the time forgot the tragedy from which I was escaping.

They birled the bottle between them, Clancarty and Thurot, myself virtually avoiding it, but clinking now and then, and laughing with them at the numerous exploits they recalled of him that was the bond between us; Horn elsewhere found himself well treated also; and listening to these two gentlemen of the world, their allusions, off-hand, to the great, their indications of adventure, travel, intrigue, enterprise, gaiety, I saw my horizon expand until it was no longer a cabin on the sea I sat in, with the lamplight swinging over me, but a spacious world of castles, palaces, forests, streets, churches, casernes, harbours, masquerades, routs, operas, love, laughter, and song. Perhaps they saw my elation and fully understood, and smiled within them at my efforts to figure as a little man of the world too – as boys will – but they never showed me other than the finest sympathy and attention.

I found them fascinating at night; I found them much the same at morning, which is the test of the thing in youth, and straightway made a hero of the foreigner Thurot. Clancarty was well enough, but without any method in his life, beyond a principle of keeping his character ever trim and presentable like his cravat. Thurot carried on his strenuous career as soldier, sailor, spy, politician, with a plausible enough theory that thus he got the very juice and pang of life, that at the most, as he would aye be telling me, was brief to an absurdity.

“Your Scots,” he would say to me, “as a rule, are too phlegmatic – is it not, Lord Clancarty? – but your uncle gave me, on my word, a regard for your whole nation. He had aplomb – Monsieur Andrew; he had luck too, and if he cracked a nut anywhere there was always a good kernel in it.” And the shoes see how I took the allusion to King George, and that gave me a flood of light upon my new position.

I remembered that in my uncle’s log-book the greater part of the narrative of his adventures in France had to do with politics and the intrigues of the Jacobite party. He was not, himself, apparently, “out,” as we call it, in the affair of the ‘Forty-five, because he did not believe the occasion suitable, and thought the Prince precipitous, but before and after that untoward event for poor Scotland, he had been active with such men as Clancarty, Lord Clare, the Murrays, the Mareschal, and such-like, which was not to be wondered at, perhaps, for our family had consistently been Jacobite, a fact that helped to its latter undoing, though my father as nominal head of the house had taken no interest in politics; and my own sympathies had ever been with the Chevalier, whom I as a boy had seen ride through the city of Glasgow, wishing myself old enough to be his follower in such a glittering escapade as he was then embarked on.

But though I thought all this in a flash as it were, I betrayed nothing to Captain Thurot, who seemed somewhat dashed at my silence. There must have been something in my face, however, to show that I fully realised what he was feeling at, and was not too complacent, for Clancarty laughed.

“Sure, ‘tis a good boy, Thurot,” said he, “and loves his King George properly, like a true patriot.”

“I won’t believe it of a Greig,” said Captain Thurot. “A pestilent, dull thing, loyalty in England; the other thing came much more readily, I remember, to the genius of Andrew Greig. Come! Monsieur Paul, to be quite frank about it, have you no instincts of friendliness to the exiled house? M. Tête-de-fer has a great need at this particular moment for English friends. Once he could count on your uncle to the last ditch; can he count on the nephew?”

“M. Tête-de-fer?” I repeated, somewhat bewildered.

“M. Tête-de-mouche, rather,” cried my lord, testily, and then hurried to correct himself. “He alluded, Monsieur Greig, to Prince Charles Edward. We are all, I may confess, his Royal Highness’s most humble servants; some of us, however – as our good friend, Captain Thurot – more actively than others. For myself I begin to weary of a cause that has been dormant for eight years, but no matter; sure one must have a recreation!”

I looked at his lordship to see if he was joking. He was the relic of a handsome man, though still, I daresay, less than fifty years of age, with a clever face and gentle, just tinged by the tracery of small surface veins to a redness that accused him of too many late nights; his mouth and eyes, that at one time must have been fascinating, had the ultimate irresolution that comes to one who finds no fingerposts at life’s cross-roads and thinks one road just as good’s another. He was born at Atena, near Hamburg (so much I had remembered from my uncle’s memoir), but he was, even in his accent, as Irish as Kerry. Someway I liked and yet doubted him, in spite of all the praise of him that I had read in a dead man’s diurnal.

“Fi donc! vous devriez avoir honte, milord,” cried Thurot, somewhat disturbed, I saw, at this reckless levity.

“Ashamed!” said his lordship, laughing; “why, ‘tis for his Royal Highness who has taken a diligence to the devil, and left us poor dependants to pay the bill at the inn. But no matter, Master Greig, I’ll be cursed if I say a single word more to spoil a charming picture of royalty under a cloud.” And so saying he lounged away from us, a strange exquisite for shipboard, laced up to the nines, as the saying goes, parading the deck as it had been the Rue St. Honoré, with merry words for every sailorman who tapped a forehead to him.

Captain Thurot looked at him, smiling, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Tête-de-mouche! There it is for you, M. Paul – the head of a butterfly. Now you – ” he commanded my eyes most masterfully – “now you have a Scotsman’s earnestness; I should like to see you on the right side. Mon Dieu, you owe us your life, no less; ‘tis no more King George’s, for one of his subjects has morally sent you to the bottom of the sea in a scuttled ship. I wish we had laid hands on your Risk and his augers.”

But I was learning my world; I was cautious; I said neither yea nor nay.

CHAPTER XIV

IN DUNKERQUE – A LADY SPEAKS TO ME IN SCOTS AND A FAT PRIEST SEEMS TO HAVE SOMETHING ON HIS MIND

Two days after, the Roi Rouge came 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 a boulangerie upon 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 the boulangerie was 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 a déjeuner. 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 his soutane, 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.