The Shoes of Fortune

“Inconsistency!” she repeated bitterly. “That need not surprise you! But I do not understand.”

“It is simply that – perhaps to hasten me to my duties – his Royal Highness this morning sent a ruffian to fight me.”

I have never seen a face so suddenly change as hers did when she heard this; for ordinary she had a look of considerable amiability, a soft, kind eye, a ready smile that had the hint (as I have elsewhere said) of melancholy, a voice that, especially in the Scots, was singularly attractive. A temper was the last thing I would have charged her with, yet now she fairly flamed, “What is this you are telling me, Paul Greig?” she cried, her eyes stormy, her bosom beginning to heave. “Oh, just that M. Albany (as he calls himself) has some grudge against me, for he sent a man – Bonnat – to pick a quarrel with me, and by Bonnat’s own confession the duel that was to ensue was to be à outrance. But for the intervention of a friend, half an hour ago, there would have been a vacancy already in the Regiment d’Auvergne.”

“Good heavens!” she cried. “You must be mistaken. What object in the wide world could his Royal Highness have in doing you any harm? You were an instrument in the preservation of his life.”

I bowed extremely low, with a touch of the courts I had not when I landed first in Dunkerque.

“I have had the distinguished honour, Miss Walkinshaw,” I said. “And I should have thought that enough to counterbalance my unfortunate and ignorant engagement with his enemies.”

“But why, in Heaven’s name, should he have a shred of resentment against you?”

“It seems,” I said, “that it has something to do with my boldness in using the Rue de la Boucherie for an occasional promenade.”

She put her two hands up to her face for a moment, but I could see the wine-spill in between, and her very neck was in a flame.

“Oh, the shame! the shame!” she cried, and began to walk up and down the room like one demented. “Am I to suffer these insults for ever in spite of all that I may do to prove – to prove – ”

She pulled herself up short, put down her hands from a face exceedingly distressed, and looked closely at me. “What must you think of me, Mr. Greig?” she asked suddenly in quite a new key.

“What do I think of myself to so disturb you?” I replied. “I do not know in what way I have vexed you, but to do so was not at all in my intention. I must tell you that I am not a politician, and that since I came here these affairs of the Prince and all the rest of it are quite beyond my understanding. If the cause of the white cockade brought you to France, Miss Walkinshaw, as seems apparent, I cannot think you are very happy in it nowadays, but that is no affair of mine.”

She stared at me. “I hope,” said she, “you are not mocking me?”

“Heaven forbid!” I said. “It would be the last thing I should presume to do, even if I had a reason. I owe you, after all, nothing but the deepest gratitude.”

Beyond the parlour we stood in was a lesser room that was the lady’s boudoir. We stood with our backs to it, and I know not how much of our conversation had been overheard when I suddenly turned at the sound of a man’s voice, and saw his Royal Highness standing in the door!

I could have rubbed my eyes out of sheer incredulity, for that he should be in that position was as if I had come upon a ghost. He stood with a face flushed and frowning, rubbing his eyes, and there was something in his manner that suggested he was not wholly sober.

“I’ll be cursed,” said he, “if I haven’t been asleep. Deuce take Clancarty! He kept me at cards till dawn this morning, and I feel as if I had been all night on heather. Pardieu– !”

He pulled himself up short and stared, seeing me for the first time. His face grew purple with annoyance. “A thousand pardons!” he cried with sarcasm, and making a deep bow. “I was not aware that I intruded on affairs.”

Miss Walkinshaw turned to him sharply.

“There is no intrusion,” said she, “but honesty, in the person of my dear countryman, who has come to strange quarters with it. Your Royal Highness has now the opportunity of thanking this gentleman.”

“I’ faith,” said he, “I seem to be kept pretty constantly in mind of the little I owe to this gentleman in spite of himself. Harkee, my good Monsieur, I got you a post; I thought you had been out of Dunkerque by now.”

“The post waits, M. Albany,” said I, “and I am going to take it up forthwith. I came here to thank the person to whose kindness I owe the post, and now I am in a quandary as to whom my thanks should be addressed.”

“My dear Monsieur, to whom but to your countrywoman? We all of us owe her everything, and – egad! – are not grateful enough,” and with that he looked for the first time at her with his frown gone.

“Yes, yes,” she cried; “we may put off the compliments till another occasion. What I must say is that it is a grief and a shame to me that this gentleman, who has done so much for me – I speak for myself, your Royal Highness will observe – should be so poorly requited.”

“Requited!” cried he. “How now? I trust Monsieur is not dissatisfied.” His face had grown like paste, his hand, that constantly fumbled at his unshaven chin, was trembling. I felt a mortal pity for this child of kings, discredited and debauched, and yet I felt bound to express myself upon the trap that he had laid for me, if Bonnat’s words were true.

“I have said my thanks, M. Albany, very stammeringly for the d’Auvergne office, because I can only guess at my benefactor. My gratitude – ”

“Bah!” cried he. “Tis the scurviest of qualities. A benefactor that does aught for gratitude had as lief be a selfish scoundrel. We want none of your gratitude, Monsieur Greig.”

“‘Tis just as well, M. Albany,” I cried, “for what there was of it is mortgaged.”

“Comment?” he asked, uneasily.

“I was challenged to a duel this morning with a man Bonnat that calls himself your servant,” I replied, always very careful to take his own word for it and assume I spoke to no prince, but simply M. Albany. “He informed me that you had, Monsieur, some objection to my sharing the same street with you, and had given him his instructions.”

“Bonnat,” cried the Prince, and rubbed his hand across his temples. “I’ll be cursed if I have seen the man for a month. Stay! – stay – let me think! Now that I remember, he met me last night after dinner, but – but – ”

“After dinner! Then surely it should have been in a more favourable mood to myself, that has done M. Albany no harm,” I said. “I do not wonder that M. Albany has lost so many of his friends if he settles their destinies after dinner.”

At first he frowned at this and then he laughed outright.

“Ma foi!” he cried, “here’s another Greig to call me gomeral to my face,” and he lounged to a chair where he sunk in inextinguishable laughter.

But if I had brought laughter from him I had precipitated anger elsewhere.

“Here’s a pretty way to speak to his Royal Highness,” cried Miss Walkinshaw, her face like thunder. “The manners of the Mearns shine very poorly here. You forget that you speak to one that is your prince, in faith your king!”

“Neither prince nor king of mine, Miss Walkinshaw,” I cried, and turned to go. “No, if a hundred thousand swords were at his back. I had once a notion of a prince that rode along the Gallowgate, but I was then a boy, and now I am a man – which you yourself have made me.”

With that I bowed low and left them. They neither of them said a word. It was the last I was to see of Clementina Walkinshaw and the last of Charles Edward.

CHAPTER XXXIV

OF MY WINTER CAMPAIGN IN PRUSSIA, AND ANOTHER MEETING WITH MACKELLAR OF KILBRIDE

I have no intention here of narrating at large what happened in my short career as a soldier of the French Army, curious though some of the things that befell me chanced to be. They may stand for another occasion, while I hurriedly and briefly chronicle what led to my second meeting with MacKellar of Kilbride, and through that same to the restoration of the company of Father Hamilton, the sometime priest of Dixmunde.

The Regiment d’Auvergne was far from its native hills when first I joined it, being indeed on the frontier of Austria. ‘Twas a corps not long embodied, composed of a preposterous number of mere lads as soft as kail, yet driven to miracles of exertion by drafted veteran officers of other regiments who stiffened their command with the flat of the sword. As for my lieutenancy it was nothing to be proud of in such a battalion, for I herded in a mess of foul-mouthed scoundrels and learned little of the trade of soldiering that I was supposed to be taught in the interval between our departure from the frontier and our engagement on the field as allies with the Austrians. Of the Scots that had been in the regiment at one time there was only one left – a major named MacKay, that came somewhere out of the Reay country in the shire of Sutherland, and was reputed the drunkenest officer among the allies, yet comported himself, on the strength of his Hielan’ extraction, towards myself, his Lowland countryman, with such a ludicrous haughtiness I could not bear the man – no, not from the first moment I set eyes on him!

He was a pompous little person with legs bowed through years of riding horse, and naturally he was the first of my new comrades I introduced myself to when I joined the colours. I mind he sat upon a keg of bullets, looking like a vision of Bacchus, somewhat soiled and pimply, when I entered to him and addressed him, with a certain gladness, in our tongue.

“Humph!” was what he said. “Another of his Royal Highness’s Sassenach friends! Here’s a wheen of the lousiest French privates ever shook in their breeks in front of a cannon, wanting smeddum and courage drummed into them with a scabbard, and they send me Sassenachs to do the business with when the whole hearty North of Scotland is crawling with the stuff I want particularly.”

“Anyway, here I am, major,” said I, slightly taken aback at this, “and you’ll have to make the best of me.”

“Pshaw!” cried he vulgarly and cracked his thumb. “I have small stomach for his Royal Highness’s recommendations; I have found in the past that he sends to Austria – him and his friends – only the stuff he has no use for nearer the English Channel, where it’s I would like to be this day. They’re talking of an invasion, I hear; wouldn’t I like to be among the first to have a slap again at Geordie?”

My birse rose at this, which I regarded as a rank treason in any man that spoke my own language even with a tartan accent.

“A slap at Geordie!” I cried. “You made a bonny-like job o’t when you had the chance!”

It was my first and last confabulation of a private nature with Major Dugald MacKay. Thereafter he seldom looked the road I was on beyond to give an order or pick a fault, and, luckily, though a pleasant footing with my neighbours has ever been my one desire in life, I was not much put up or down by the ill-will of such a creature.

Like a break in a dream, a space of all unfriended travelling, which is the worst travelling of all, appears my time of marching with the Regiment d’Auvergne. I was lost among aliens – aliens in tongue and sentiment, and engaged, to tell the truth, upon an enterprise that never enlisted the faintest of my sympathy. All I wished was to forget the past (and that, be sure, was the one impossible thing), and make a living of some sort. The latter could not well be more scanty, for my pay was a beggar’s, and infrequent at that, and finally it wholly ceased.