The Shoes of Fortune

I got very red at that.

“You see, you cannot be frank with me, Mr. Greig,” she said bitterly.

“Well, then,” I ventured boldly, “what I should have said was that I feared you would not be there, for it’s there I was glad to see you. And I have only discovered that in my mind since you have been angry with me and would not let me explain myself.”

“What!” she cried, quite radiant, “and, after all, the red shoon were not without a purpose? Oh, Mr. Greig, you’re unco’ blate! And, to tell you the truth, I was just play-acting yonder myself. I was only making believe to be angry wi’ you, and now that we understand each ither you can see me to my parlour.”

“Well, Bernard,” she said to the Swiss as we entered, “any news?”

He informed her there was none.

“What! no one called?” said she with manifest disappointment.

“Personne, Madame.”

“No letters?”

Nor were there any letters, he replied.

She sighed, paused irresolute a moment with her foot on the stair, one hand at her heart, the other at the fastening of her coat, and looked at me with a face almost tragic in its trouble. I cannot but think she was on the brink of a confidence, but ere it came she changed her mind and dashed up the stair with a tra-la-la of a song meant to indicate her indifference, leaving me a while in her parlour while she changed her dress. She came back to me in a little, attired in a pale primrose-coloured paduasoy, the cuffs and throat embroidered in a pattern of roses and leaves, her hair unpowdered and glossy, wantoning in and out of a neck beyond description. The first thing she did on entrance was odd enough, for it was to stand over me where I lounged on her settee, staring down into my eyes until I felt a monstrous embarrassment.

“I am wonderin’,” said she, “if ye are the man I tak’ ye for.”

Her eyes were moist; I saw she had been crying in her toilet room.

“I’m just the man you see,” I said, “but for some unco’ troubles that are inside me and are not for airing to my friends on a fine day in Dunkerque.”

“Perhaps, like the lave of folks, ye dinna ken yoursel’,” she went on, speaking with no sprightly humour though in the Scots she was given to fall to in her moments of fun. “All men, Mr. Greig, mean well, but most of them fall short of their own ideals; they’re like the women in that, no doubt, but in the men the consequence is more disastrous.”

“When I was a girl in a place you know,” she went on even more soberly, “I fancied all men were on the model of honest John Walkinshaw – better within than without. He was stern to austerity, demanding the last particle of duty from his children, and to some he might seem hard, but I have never met the man yet with a kinder heart, a pleasanter mind, a more pious disposition than John Walkin-shaw’s. It has taken ten years, and acquaintance with some gentry not of Scotland, to make it plain that all men are not on his model.”

“I could fancy not, to judge from his daughter,” I said, blushing at my first compliment that was none the less bold because it was sincere.

At that she put on a little mouth and shrugged her shoulders with a shiver that made the snaps in her ears tremble.

“My good young man,” said she, “there you go! If there’s to be any friendship between you and Clementina Walkinshaw, understand there must be a different key from that. You are not only learning your French, but you are learning, it would seem, the manners of the nation. It was that made me wonder if you could be the man I took you for the first day you were in this room and I found I could make you greet with a Scots sang, and tell me honestly about a lass you had a notion of and her no’ me. That last’s the great stroke of honesty in any man, and let me tell you there are some women who would not relish it. But you are in a company here so ready with the tongue of flattery that I doubt each word they utter, and that’s droll enough in me that loves my fellow creatures, and used to think the very best of every one of them. If I doubt them now I doubt them with a sore enough heart, I’ll warrant you. Oh! am I not sorry that my man of Mearns should be put in the reverence of such creatures as Clancarty and Thurot, and all that gang of worldlings? I do not suppose I could make you understand it, Mr. Paul Greig, but I feel motherly to you, and to see my son – this great giant fellow who kens the town of Glasgow and dwelt in Mearns where I had May milk, and speaks wi’ the fine Scots tongue like mysel’ when his heart is true – to see him the boon comrade with folks perhaps good enough for Clementina Walkinshaw but lacking a particle of principle, is a sight to sorrow me.”

“And is it for that you seek to get me away with the priest?” I asked, surprised at all this, and a little resenting the suggestion of youth implied in her feeling like a mother to me. Her face was lit, her movement free and beautiful; something in her fascinated me.

She dropped in a chair and pushed the hair from her ears with a hand like milk, and laughed.

“Now how could you guess?” said she. “Am I no’ the careful mother of you to put you in the hands o’ the clergy? I doubt this play-acting rhetorician of a man from Dixmunde is no great improvement on the rest of your company when all’s said and done, but you’ll be none the worse for seeing the world at his costs, and being in other company than Clancarty’s and Thurot’s and Roscommon’s. He told me to-day you were going with him, and I was glad that I had been of that little service to you.”

“Then it seems you think so little of my company as to be willing enough to be rid of me at the earliest opportunity,” I said, honestly somewhat piqued at her readiness to clear me out of Dunkerque.

She looked at me oddly. “Havers, Mr. Greig!” said she, “just havers!”

I was thanking her for her offices, but she checked me. “You are well off,” she said, “to be away from here while these foolish manouvrings are on foot. Poor me! I must bide and see them plan the breaking down of my native country. It’s a mercy I know in what a fiasco it will end, this planning. Hearken! Do you hear the bugles? That’s Soubise going back to the caserne. He and his little men are going back to eat another dinner destined to assist in the destruction of an island where you and I should be this day if we were wiser than we are. Fancy them destroying Britain, Mr. Greig! – Britain, where honest John Walkinshaw is, that never said an ill word in his life, nor owed any man a penny: where the folks are guid and true, and fear God and want nothing but to be left to their crofts and herds. If it was England – if it was the palace of Saint James – no, but it’s Scotland, too, and the men you saw marching up and down to-day are to be marching over the moor o’ Mearns when the heather’s red. Can you think of it?” She stamped her foot. “Where the wee thack hooses are at the foot o’ the braes, and the bairns playing under the rowan trees; where the peat is smelling, and the burns are singing in the glens, and the kirk-bells are ringing. Poor Mr. Greig! Are ye no’ wae for Scotland? Do ye think Providence will let a man like Thomond ye saw to-day cursing on horseback – do ye think Providence will let him lead a French army among the roads you and I ken so well, affronting the people we ken too, who may be a thought dull in the matter of repartee, but are for ever decent, who may be hard-visaged, but are so brave?”

She laughed, herself, half bitterly, half contemptuously, at the picture she drew. Outside, in the sunny air of the afternoon, the bugles of Soubise filled the street with brazen cries, and nearer came the roar of pounding drums. I thought I heard them menacing the sleep of evening valleys far away, shattering the calm of the hearth of Hazel Den.

“The cause for which – for which so many are exile here,” I said, looking on this Jacobite so strangely inconsistent, “has no reason to regret that France should plan an attack on Georgius Rex.”

She shook her head impatiently. “The cause has nothing to do with it, Mr. Greig,” said she. “The cause will suffer from this madness more than ever it did, but in any case ‘tis the most miserable of lost causes.”

“Prince Charlie-”

“Once it was the cause with me, now I would sooner have it Scotland,” she went on, heedless of my interruption. “Scotland! Scotland! Oh, how the name of her is like a dirge to me, and my heart is sore for her! Where is your heart, Mr. Greig, that it does not feel alarm at the prospect of these crapauds making a single night’s sleep uneasy for the folks you know? Where is your heart, I’m asking?”

“I wish I knew,” said I impulsively, staring at her, completely bewitched by her manner so variable and intense, and the straying tendrils of her hair.

“Do you not?” said she. “Then I will tell you. It is where it ought to be – with a girl of the name of Isobel Fortune. Oh, the dear name! oh, the sweet name! And when you are on your travels with this priest do not be forgetting her. Oh, yes! I know you will tell me again that all is over between the pair of you, and that she loved another – but I am not believing a word of that, Mr. Greig, when I look at you – (and will ye say ‘thank ye’ for the compliment that’s there?) – you will just go on thinking her the same, and you will be the better man for it. There’s something tells me she is thinking of you though I never saw her, the dear! Let me see, this is what sort of girl she will be.”

She drew her chair closer to the settee and leaned forward in front of me, and, fixing her eyes on mine, drew a picture of the girl of Kirkillstane as she imagined her.

“She will be about my own height, and with the same colour of hair-”

“How do you know that? I never said a word of that to you,” I cried, astonished at the nearness of her first guess.

“Oh, I’m a witch,” she cried triumphantly, “a fair witch. Hoots! do I no’ ken ye wadna hae looked the side o’ the street I was on if I hadna put ye in mind o’ her? Well, she’s my height and colour – but, alack-a-day, no’ my years. She ‘ll have a voice like the mavis for sweetness, and ‘ll sing to perfection. She’ll be shy and forward in turns, accordin’ as you are forward and shy; she ‘ll can break your heart in ten minutes wi’ a pout o’ her lips or mak’ ye fair dizzy with delight at a smile. And then” – here Miss Walkinshaw seemed carried away herself by her fancy portrait, for she bent her brows studiously as she thought, and seemed to speak in an abstraction – “and then she’ll be a managing woman. She’ll be the sort of woman that the Bible tells of whose value is over rubies; knowing your needs as you battle with the world, and cheerful when you come in to the hearthstone from the turmoil outside. A witty woman and a judge of things, calm but full of fire in your interests. A household where the wife’s a doll is a cart with one wheel, and your Isobel will be the perfect woman. I think she must have travelled some, too, and seen how poor is the wide world compared with what is to be found at your own fire-end; I think she must have had trials and learned to be brave.”

She stopped suddenly, looked at me and got very red in the face.

“A fine picture, Miss Walkinshaw!” said I, with something drumming at my heart. “It is not just altogether like Isobel Fortune, who has long syne forgot but to detest me, but I fancy I know who it is like.”

“And who might that be?” she asked in a low voice and with a somewhat guilty look.

“Will I tell you?” I asked, myself alarmed at my boldness.

“No! no! never mind,” she cried. “I was just making a picture of a girl I once knew – poor lass! and of what she might have been. But she’s dead – dead and buried. I hope, after all, your Isobel is a nobler woman than the one I was thinking on and a happier destiny awaiting her.”

“That cannot matter much to me now,” I said, “for, as I told you, there is nothing any more between us – except – except a corp upon the heather.”

She shuddered as she did the first time I told her of my tragedy, and sucked in the air again through her clenched teeth.

“Poor lad! poor lad!” said she. “And you have quite lost her. If so, and the thing must be, then this glass coach of Father Hamilton’s must take you to the country of forgetfulness. I wish I could drive there myself this minute, but wae’s me, there’s no chariot at the remise that’ll do that business for John Walkinshaw’s girl.”

Something inexpressively moving was in her mien, all her heart was in her face as it seemed; a flash of fancy came to me that she was alone in the world with nothing of affection to hap her round from its abrasions, and that her soul was crying out for love. Sweet beyond expression was this woman and I was young; up to my feet I rose, and turned on her a face that must have plainly revealed my boyish passion.

“Miss Walkinshaw,” I said, “you may put me out of this door for ever, but I’m bound to say I’m going travelling in no glass coach; Dunkerque will be doing very well for me.”

Her lips trembled; her cheek turned pale; she placed a hand upon her breast, and there was I contrite before her anger!

“Is this – is this your respect and your esteem, Mr. Greig?” she asked brokenly.

“They were never greater than at this moment,” I replied.

“And how are they to be manifested by your waiting on in Dunkerque?” she asked, recovering her colour and some of her ordinary manner.