The Shoes of Fortune

Round and round and across and across we marched in the great quadrangle, every man treading the rogues’ measure with leg-weary reluctance, many cursing their warders under breath, most scowling, all hopeless and all lost.

‘Twas the exercise of the day.

As we slouched through that mad ceremony in the mud of the yard, with rain still drizzling on us, the parrot in its cage had a voice loud and shrill above the commands of the grenadiers and officers; sang its taunting song, or whistled like a street boy, a beast so free, so careless and remote, that I had a fancy it had the only soul in the place.

As I say, we were divided into gangs, each gang taking its own course back and forward in the yard as its commander ordered. The gang I was with marched a little apart from the rest. We were none of us in this gang in the ugly livery of the prison, but in our own clothing, and we were, it appeared, allowed that privilege because we were yet to try. I knew no reason for the distinction at the time, nor did I prize it very much, for looking all about the yard – at the officers, the grenadiers, and other functionaries of the prison, I failed to see a single face I knew. What could I conclude but that Buhot was gone and that I was doomed to be forgotten here?

It would have been a comfort even to have got a glimpse of Father Hamilton, the man whose machinations were the cause of my imprisonment, but Father Hamilton, if he had been taken here as Buhot had suggested, was not, at all events, in view.

After the morning’s exercise we that were the privileged were taken to what was called the salle dépreuve, and with three or four to each gamelle or mess-tub, ate a scurvy meal of a thin soup and black bread and onions. To a man who had been living for a month at heck and manger, as we say, this might naturally seem unpalatable fare, but truth to tell I ate it with a relish that had been all the greater had it been permitted me to speak to any of my fellow sufferers. But speech was strictly interdict and so our meal was supped in silence.

When it was over I was to be fated for the pleasantest of surprises!

There came to me a sous-officer of the grenadiers.

In French he asked if I was Monsieur Greig. I said as best I could in the same tongue that I was that unhappy person at his service. Then, said he, “Come with me.” He led me into a hall about a hundred feet long that had beds or mattresses for about three hundred people. The room was empty, as those who occupied it were, he said, at Mass. Its open windows in front looked into another courtyard from that in which we had been exercising, while the windows at the rear looked into a garden where already lilac was in bloom and daffodillies endowed the soil of a few mounds with the colour of the gold. On the other side of the court first named there was a huge building. “Galbanon,” said my guide, pointing to it, and then made me understand that the same was worse by far than the Bastille, and at the moment full of Marquises, Counts, Jesuits, and other clergymen, many of them in irons for abusing or writing against the Marchioness de Pompadour.

I listened respectfully and waited Monsieur’s explanation. It was manifest I had not been brought into this hall for the good of my education, and naturally I concluded the name of Galbanon, that I had heard already from Buhot, with its villainous reputation, was meant to terrify me into a submission to what had been proposed. The moment after a hearty meal – even of soup maigre– was not, however, the happiest of times to work upon a Greig’s feelings of fear or apprehension, and so I waited, very dour within upon my resolution though outwardly in the most complacent spirit.

The hall was empty when we entered as I have said, but we had not been many minutes in it when the tramp of men returning to it might be heard, and this hurried my friend the officer to his real business.

He whipped a letter from his pocket and put it in my hand with a sign to compel secrecy on my part. It may be readily believed I was quick enough to conceal the missive. He had no cause to complain of the face I turned upon another officer who came up to us, for ‘twas a visage of clownish vacuity.

The duty of the second officer, it appeared, was to take me to a new cell that had been in preparation for me, and when I got there it was with satisfaction I discovered it more than tolerable, with a sufficiency of air and space, a good light from the quadrangle, a few books, paper, and a writing standish.

When the door had been shut upon me, I turned to open my letter and found there was in fact a couple of them – a few lines from her ladyship in Dunkerque expressing her continued interest in my welfare and adventures, and another from the Swiss through whom the first had come. He was still – said the honest Bernard – at my service, having eluded the vigilance of Buhot, who doubtless thought a lackey scarce worth his hunting, and he was still in a position to post my letters, thanks to the goodwill of the sous-officer who was a relative. Furthermore, he was in hopes that Miss Walkinshaw, who was on terms of intimacy with the great world and something of an intriguante, would speedily take steps to secure my freedom. “Be tranquil, dear Monsieur!” concluded the brave fellow, and I was so exceedingly comforted and inspired by these matters that I straightway sat down to the continuation of my journal for Miss Walkinshaw’s behoof. I had scarce dipped the pen, when my cell door opened and gave entrance to the man who was the cause of my incarceration.

The door shut and locked behind him; it was Father Hamilton!

It was indeed Father Hamilton, by all appearance none the worse in body for his violent escapade, so weighty with the most fatal possibilities for himself, for he advanced to me almost gaily, his hand extended and his face red and smiling.

“Scotland! to my heart!” cries he in the French, and throws his arms about me before I could resist, and kisses me on the cheeks after the amusing fashion of his nation. “La! la! la! Paul,” he cried, “I’d have wanted three breakfasts sooner than miss this meeting with my good secretary lad that is the lovablest rogue never dipped a pen in his master’s service. Might have been dead for all I knew, and run through by a brutal rapier, victim of mine own innocence. But here’s my Paul, pardieu! I would as soon have my croque-mort now as that jolly dog his uncle, that never waked till midnight or slept till the dull, uninteresting noon in the years when we went roving. What! Paul! Paul Greig! my croque-mort! my Don Dolorous! – oh, Lord, my child, I am the most miserable of wretches!”

And there he let me go, and threw himself upon a chair, and gave his vast body to a convulsion of arid sobs. The man was in hysterics, compounding smiles and sobs a score to the minute, but at the end ‘twas the natural man won the bout, else he had taken a stroke. I stood by him in perplexity of opinions whether to laugh or storm, whether to give myself to the righteous horror a good man ought to feel in the presence of a murtherer, or shrug my shoulders tolerantly at the imbecile.

“There!” said he, recovering his natural manner, “I have made a mortal enemy of Andrew Greig’s nephew. Yes, yes, master, glower at Misery, fat Misery – and the devil take it! – old Misery, without a penny in ‘ts pocket, and its next trip upon wheels a trip to the block to nuzzle at the dirty end in damp sawdust a nose that has appreciated the bouquet of the rarest wines. Paul, my boy, has’t a pinch of snuff? A brutal bird out there sings a stave of the Chanson de la Veuve so like the confounded thing that I heard my own foolish old head drop into the basket, and there! I swear to you the smell of the sawdust is in my nostrils now.”

I handed him my box; ‘twas a mull my Uncle Andy gave me before he died, made of the horn of a young bullock, with a blazon of the house on the silver lid. He took it eagerly and drenched himself with the contents.

“Oh, la! la!” he cried; “I give thanks. My head was like yeast. I wish it were Christmas last, and a man called Hamilton was back in Dixmunde parish. But there! that is enough, I have made my bed and I must lie on’t, with a blight on all militant jesuitry! When last I had this box in my fingers they were as steady as Mont St. Michel, now look – they are trembling like aspen, n’est-ce pas? And all that’s different is that I have eaten one or two better dinners and cracked a few pipkins of better wine, and – and – well-nigh killed a police officer. Did’st ever hear of one Hamilton, M. Greig? ‘Twas a cheery old fellow in Dixmunde whose name was the same as mine, and had a garden and bee-hives, and I am on the rack for my sins.”

He might be on the rack – and, indeed, I daresay the man was in a passion of feelings so that he knew not what he was havering about, but what impressed me most of all about him was that he seemed to have some momentary gleams of satisfaction in his situation.

“I have every ground of complaint against you, sir,” I said.

“What!” he interrupted. “Would’st plague an old man with complaints when M. de Paris is tapping him on the shoulder to come away and smell the sawdust of his own coffin? Oh, ‘tis not in this wise thy uncle had done, but no matter!”

“I have no wish, Father Hamilton, to revile you for what you have brought me,” I hastened to tell him. “That is far from my thoughts, though now that you put me in mind of it, there is some ground for my blaming you if blaming was in my intention. But I shall blame you for this, that you are a priest of the Church and a Frenchman, and yet did draw a murderous hand upon a prince of your own country.”

This took him somewhat aback. He helped himself to another voluminous pinch of my snuff to give him time for a rejoinder and then – “Regicide, M. Greig, is sometimes to be defended when – ”

“Regicide!” I cried, losing all patience, “give us the plain English of it, Father Hamilton, and call it murder. To call it by a Latin name makes it none the more respectable a crime against the courts of heaven where the curse of Babel has an end. But for an accident, or the cunning of others, you had a corpse upon your conscience this day, and your name had been abhorred throughout the whole of Europe.”

He put his shoulders up till his dew-laps fell in massive folds.

“‘Fore God!” said he, “here’s a treatise in black letter from Andrew Greig’s nephew. It comes indifferently well, I assure thee, from Andrew’s nephew. Those who live in glass houses, cher ami, – those who live in glass houses – ”

He tapped me upon the breast with his fat finger and paused, with a significant look upon his countenance.

“Oh, ye can out with it, Father Hamilton!” I cried, certain I knew his meaning.

“Those who live in glass houses,” said he, “should have some pity for a poor old devil out in the weather without a shelter of any sort.”

“You were about to taunt me with my own unhappy affair,” I said, little relishing his consideration.

“Was I, M. Greig?” he said softly. “Faith! a glass residence seems to breed an ungenerous disposition! If thou can’st credit me I know nothing of thine affair beyond what I may have suspected from a Greig travelling hurriedly and in red shoes. I make you my compliments, Monsieur, of your morality that must be horror-struck at my foolish play with a pistol, yet thinks me capable of a retort so vile as that you indicate. My dear lad, I but spoke of what we have spoken of together before in our happy chariot in the woods of Somme – thine uncle’s fate, and all I expected was, that remembering the same, thou his nephew would’st have enough tolerance for an old fool to leave his punishment in the hands of the constitute authority. Voilà! I wish to heaven they had given me another cell, after all, that I might have imagined thy pity for one that did thee no harm, or at least meant to do none, which is the main thing with all our acts else Purgatory’s more crowded than I fancy.”

He went wearily over to the fire and spread his trembling hands to the blaze; I looked after him perplexed in my mind, but not without an overpowering pity.

“I have come, like thyself, doubtless,” he said after a little, “over vile roads in a common cart, and lay awake last night in a dungeon – a pretty conclusion to my excursion! And yet I am vastly more happy to-day than I was this time yesterday morning.”

“But then you were free,” I said, “you had all you need wish for – money, a conveyance, servants, leisure – ”

“And M’ Croque-mort’s company,” he added with a poor smile. “True, true! But the thing was then to do,” and he shuddered. “Now my part is done, ‘twas by God’s grace a failure, and I could sing for content like one of the little birds we heard the other day in Somme.”

He could not but see my bewilderment in my face.

“You wonder at that,” said he, relinquishing the Roman manner as he always did when most in earnest. “Does Monsieur fancy a poor old priest can take to the ancient art of assassination with an easy mind? Nom de nom! I could skip to the block like a ballet-dancer if ‘twere either that or live the past two days over again and fifty years after. I have none of the right stomach for murder; that’s flat! ‘tis a business that keeps you awake too much at night, and disturbs the gastric essence; calls, too, for a confounded agility that must be lacking in a person of my handsome and plenteous bulk. I had rather go fishing any day in the week than imbrue. When Buhot entered the room where I waited for a less worthy man and I fired honestly for my money and missed, I could have died of sheer rapture. Instead I threw myself upon his breast and embraced him.”

“He said none of that to me.”

“Like enough not, but ‘tis true none the less, though he may keep so favourable a fact out of his records. A good soul enough, Buhot! We knew him, your uncle and I, in the old days when I was thinner and played a good game of chess at three in the morning. Fancy Ned Hamilton cutting short the glorious career of old Buhot! I’d sooner pick a pocket.”

“Or kill a prince!”

“Felicitations on your wit, M. Greig! Heaven help the elderly when the new wit is toward! N’importe! Perhaps ‘twere better to kill some princes than to pick a pocket. Is it not better, or less wicked, let us say, to take the life of a man villainously abusing it than the purse of a poor wretch making the most of his scanty livres?”

And then the priest set out upon his defence. It is too long here to reproduce in his own words, even if I recalled them, and too specious in its terms for the patience of the honest world of our time. With his hands behind his back he marched up and down the room for the space of a half-hour at the least, recounting all that led to his crime. The tale was like a wild romance, but yet, as we know now, true in every particular. He was of the Society of Jesus, had lived a stormy youth, and fallen in later years into a disrepute in his own parish, and there the heads of his Society discovered him a very likely tool for their purposes. They had only half convinced him that the death of Charles Edward was for the glory of God and the good of the Church when they sent him marching with a pistol and £500 in bills of exchange and letters of credit upon a chase that covered a great part of three or four countries, and ended at Lisbon, when a German Jesuit in the secret gave him ten crusadoes to bring him home with his task unaccomplished.

“I have what amounts almost to a genius for losing the opportunities of which I do not desire to avail myself,” said Father Hamilton with a whimsical smile.

And then he had lain in disgrace with the Jesuits for a number of years until it became manifest (as he confessed with shame) that his experience of leisure, wealth, and travel had enough corrupted him to make the prospect of a second adventure of a similar kind pleasing. At that time Charles, lost to the sight of Europe, and only discovered at brief and tantalising intervals by the Jesuit agents, scarce slept two nights in the same town, but went from country to country incognito, so that ‘twas no trivial task Father Hamilton undertook to run him to earth.

“The difficulty of it – indeed the small likelihood there was of my ever seeing him,” he said, “was what mainly induced me to accept the office, though in truth it was compelled. I was doing very well at Dunkerque,” he went on, “and very happy if I had never heard more of prince or priesthood, when Father Fleuriau sent me a hurried intimation that my victim was due at Versailles on Easter and ordered my instant departure there.”

The name of Fleuriau recalled me to my senses. “Stop, stop, Father Hamilton!” I cried, “I must hear no more.”

“What!” said he, bitterly, “is’t too good a young gentleman to listen to the confession of a happy murderer that has failed at his trade?”