The Shoes of Fortune

The cool superiority of the gentleman, who had, to tell the truth, as little in his head as I had in the heel of my shoe, somewhat galled me, for it cried “Spoiled Horn!” as loud as if the taunt were bawled, so my talk with him was short. There was but one topic in it to interest me.

“Has the man with the scarred brow come yet?” he asked curiously.

I did not understand.

“Then he’s not your length yet,” said he, with the manifest gratification of one who has the hanselling of great news. “Oh! I came on him this morning outside a tavern in the Gorbals, bargaining loudly about a saddle horse for Hazel Den. I’ll warrant Hazel Den will get a start when it sees him.”

I did not care to show young Borland much curiosity in his story, and so it was just in the few words he gave it to me that I brought it home to our supper-table.

My father and mother looked at each other as if I had told them a tragedy. The supper ended abruptly. The evening worship passed unusually fast, my father reading the Book as one in a dream, and we went to our beds nigh an hour before the customary time.

CHAPTER III

OF THE COMING OF UNCLE ANDREW WITH A SCARRED FOREHEAD AND A BRASS-BOUND CHEST, AND HOW I TOOK AN INFECTION

It was a night – as often happens in the uplands of our shire in autumn weather – of vast and brooding darkness: the world seemed to swound in a breathless oven, and I had scarcely come to my chamber when thunder broke wild upon the world and torrential rain began to fall. I did not go to bed, but sat with my candle extinguished and watched the lightning show the landscape as if it had been flooded by the gleam of moon and star.

Between the roar of the thunder and the blatter of the rain there were intervals of an astounding stillness of an ominous suspense, and it seemed oddly to me, as I sat in my room, that more than I was awake in Hazel Den House. I felt sure my father and mother sat in their room, still clad and whispering; it was but the illusion of a moment – something felt by the instinct and not by reason – and then a louder, nearer peal of thunder dispelled the notion, and I made to go to bed.

I stopped like one shot, with my waistcoat half undone.

There was a sound of a horse’s hoofs coming up the loan, with the beat of them in mire sounding soft enough to make me shiver at the notion of the rider’s discomfort in that appalling night, and every now and then the metal click of shoes, showing the animal over-reached himself in the trot.

The rider drew up at the front; a flash of the lightning and the wildest thunder-peal of the night seemed to meet among our outhouses, and when the roll of the thunder ceased I heard a violent rapping at the outer door.

The servants would be long ere they let this late visitor out of the storm, I fancied, and I hurried down; but my father was there in the hall before me, all dressed, as my curious intuition had informed me, and his face strange and inscrutable in the light of a shaded candle. He was making to open the door. My appearance seemed to startle him. He paused, dubious and a trifle confused.

“I thought you had been in bed long ago,” said he, “and – ”

His sentence was not finished, for the horseman broke in upon it with a masterful rataplan upon the oak, seemingly with a whip-head or a pistol butt, and a cry, new to my ear and uncanny, rose through the beating rain.

With a sigh the most distressing I can mind of, my father seemed to reconcile himself to some fate he would have warded off if he could. He unbolted and threw back the door.

Our visitor threw himself in upon us as if we held the keys of paradise – a man like a rake for lankiness, as was manifest even through the dripping wrap-rascal that he wore; bearded cheek and chin in a fashion that must seem fiendish in our shaven country; with a wild and angry eye, the Greig mole black on his temple, and an old scar livid across his sunburned brow. He threw a three-cocked hat upon the floor with a gesture of indolent possession.

“Well, I’m damned!” cried he, “but this is a black welcome to one’s poor brother Andy,” and scarcely looked upon my father standing with the shaded candle in the wind. “What’s to drink? Drink, do you hear that Quentin? Drink – drink – d-r-i-n-k. A long strong drink too, and that’s telling you, and none of the whey that I’m hearing’s running through the Greigs now, that once was a reputable family of three bottles and a rummer to top all.”

“Whist, whist, man!” pleaded father tremulously, all the man out of him as he stood before this drunken apparition.

“Whist I quo’ he. Well stap me! do you no’ ken the lean pup of the litter?” hiccoughed our visitor, with a sort of sneer that made the blood run to my head, and for the first time I felt the great, the splendid joy of a good cause to fight for.

“You’re Andrew,” said my father simply, putting his hand upon the man’s coat sleeve in a sympathy for his drenchen clothes.

That kindly hand was jerked off rudely, an act as insolent as if he had smitten his host upon the mouth: my heart leaped, and my fingers went at his throat. I could have spread him out against the wall, though I knew him now my uncle; I could have given him the rogue’s quittance with a black face and a protruding tongue. The candle fell from my father’s hand; the glass shade shattered; the hall of Hazel Den House was plunged in darkness, and the rain drave in through the open door upon us three struggling.

“Let him go, Paul,” whispered my father, who I knew was in terror of frightening his wife, and he wrestled mightily with an arm of each of us.

Yet I could not let my uncle go, for with the other arm he held a knife, and he would perhaps have died for it had not another light come on the stair and my mother’s voice risen in a pitiful cry.

We fell asunder on a common impulse, and the drunken wanderer was the first to speak.

“Katrine,” said he; “it’s always the old tale with Andy, you see; they must be misunderstanding me,” and he bowed with a surprising gentlemanliness that could have made me almost think him not the man who had fouled our house with oaths and drawn a knife upon us in the darkness. The blade of the same, by a trick of legerdemain, had gone up the sleeve of his dripping coat. He seemed all at once sobered. He took my good mother by the hand as she stood trembling and never to know clearly upon what elements of murder she had come.

“It is you, Andrew,” said she, bravely smiling. “What a night to come home in after twenty years! I’m wae to see you in such a plight. And your horse?” said she again, lifting her candle and peering into the darkness of the night. “I must cry up Sandy to stable your horse.”

I’ll give my uncle the credit of a confusion at his own forgetfulness.

“Good Lord! Katrine,” said he, “if I did not clean forget the brute, a fiddle-faced, spavined, spatter-dasher of a Gorbals mare, no’ worth her corn; but there’s my bit kistie on her hump.”

The servant was round soon at the stabling of the mare, and my mother was brewing something of what the gentleman had had too much already, though she could not guess that; and out of the dripping night he dragged in none of a rider’s customary holsters but a little brass-bound chest.

“Yon night I set out for my fortune, Quentin,” said he, “I did not think I would come back with it a bulk so small as this; did you? It was the sight of the quiet house and the thought of all it contained that made me act like an idiot as I came in. Still, we must just take the world as we get it, Quentin; and I knew I was sure of a warm welcome in the old house, from one side of it if not from the other, for the sake of lang syne. And this is your son, is it?” he went on, looking at my six feet of indignation not yet dead “Split me if there’s whey in that piece! You near jammed my hawze that time! Your Uncle Andrew’s hawze, boy. Are you not ashamed of yourself?”

“Not a bit,” said I between my teeth; “I leave that to you.”

He smiled till his teeth shone white in his black beard, and “Lord!” cried he, “I’m that glad I came. It was but the toss of a bawbee, when I came to Leith last week, whether I should have a try at the old doocot, or up Blue Peter again and off to the Indies. I hate ceiled rooms – they mind me of the tomb; I’m out of practice at sitting doing nothing in a parlour and saying grace before meat, and – I give you warning, Quentin – I’ll be damned if I drink milk for supper. It was the notion of milk for supper and all that means that kept me from calling on Katrine – and you – any sooner. But I’m glad I came to meet a lad of spirit like young Andy here.”

“Not Andy,” said my father. “Paul is his name.”

My uncle laughed.

“That was ill done of you, Quentin,” said he; “I think it was as little as Katrine and you could do to have kept up the family name. I suppose you reckoned to change the family fate when you made him Paul. H’m! You must have forgotten that Paul the Apostle wandered most, and many ways fared worst of all the rest. I haven’t forgotten my Bible, you see, Quentin.”

We were now in the parlour room; a servant lass was puffing up a new-lighted fire; my uncle, with his head in the shade, had his greatcoat off, and stood revealed in shabby garments that had once been most genteel; and his brass-bound fortune, that he seemed averse from parting with a moment, was at his feet. Getting no answer to what he had said of the disciples, he looked from one to the other of us and laughed slyly.

“Take off your boots, Andy,” said my father.

“And where have you been since – since – the Plantations?”

“Stow that, Quentin!” cried my uncle, with an oath and his eye on me. “What Plantations are you blethering about? And where have I been? Ask me rather where have I not been. It makes me dizzy even to think of it: with rotten Jesuits and Pagan gentlemen; with France and Spain, and with filthy Lascars, lying Greeks, Eboe slaves, stinking niggers, and slit-eyed Chinese! Oh! I tell you I’ve seen things in twenty years. And places, too: this Scotland, with its infernal rain and its grey fields and its rags, looks like a nightmare to me yet. You may be sure I’ll be out of it pretty fast again.”

“Poor Scotland!” said father ambiguously.

There must be people in the world who are oddly affected by the names of places, peoples, things that have never come within their own experience. Till this day the name of Barbadoes influences me like a story of adventure; and when my Uncle Andrew – lank, bearded, drenched with storm, stood in our parlour glibly hinting at illimitable travel, I lost my anger with the tipsy wretch and felt a curious glow go through my being.

CHAPTER IV

I COME UPON THE RED SHOES

Uncle Andrew settled for the remainder of his time into our domestic world at Hazel Den as if his place had been kept warm for him since ever he went away. For the remainder of his time, I say, because he was to be in the clods of Mearns kirkyard before the hips and haws were off the hedges; and I think I someway saw his doom in his ghastly countenance the first morning he sat at our breakfast table, contrite over his folly of the night before, as you could see, but carrying off the situation with worldly sang froid, and even showing signs of some affection for my father.

His character may be put in two words – he was a lovable rogue; his tipsy bitterness to the goodman his brother may be explained almost as briefly: he had had a notion of Katrine Oliver, and had courted her before ever she met my father, and he had lost her affection through his own folly. Judging from what I would have felt myself in the like circumstances, his bitterest punishment for a life ill spent must have been to see Katrine Oliver’s pitying kindness to him now, and the sight of that douce and loving couple finding their happiness in each other must have been a constant sermon to him upon repentance.

Yet, to tell the truth, I fear my Uncle Andrew was not constituted for repentance or remorse. He had slain a man honestly once, and had suffered the Plantations, but beyond that (and even that included, as he must ever insist) he had been guilty of no mean act in all his roving career. Follies – vices – extremes – ay, a thousand of them; but for most his conscience never pricked him. On the contrary, he would narrate with gusto the manifold jeopardies his own follies brought him into; his wan face, nigh the colour of a shroud, would flush, and his eyes dance humorously as he shocked the table when we sat at meals, our spoons suspended in the agitation created by his wonderful histories.

Kept to a moderation with the bottle, and with the constant influence of my mother, who used to feed the rogue on vegetables and, unknown to him, load his broth with simples as a cure for his craving, Uncle Andrew was, all things considered, an acquisition to Hazel Den House. Speaking for myself, he brought the element of the unusual and the unexpected to a place where routine had made me sick of my own society; and though the man in his sober senses knew he was dying on his feet, he was the cheeriest person of our company sequestered so remote in the moors. It was a lesson in resignation to see yon merry eyes loweing like lamps over his tombstone cheeks, and hear him crack a joke in the flushed and heaving interludes of his cough.

It was to me he ever directed the most sensational of his extraordinary memorials. My father did not like it; I saw it in his eye. It was apparent to me that a remonstrance often hung on the tip of his tongue. He would invent ridiculous and unnecessary tasks to keep me out of reach of that alluring raconteur, and nobody saw it plainer than Uncle Andrew, who but laughed with the mischievousness of a boy.