The Shoes of Fortune

Well, the long and short of it was just what Quentin Greig feared – the Spoiled Horn finally smit with a hunger for the road of the Greigs. For three hundred years – we could go no further back, because of a bend sinister – nine out of ten of that family had travelled that road, that leads so often to a kistful of sailor’s shells and a death with boots on. It was a fate in the blood, like the black hair of us, the mole on the temple, and the trick of irony. It was that ailment my father had feared for me; it was that kept the household silent upon missing brothers (they were dead, my uncle told me, in Trincomalee, and in Jamaica, and a yard in the Borough of London); it was that inspired the notion of a lawyer’s life for Paul Greig.

Just when I was in the deepmost confidence of Uncle Andrew, who was by then confined to his bed and suffering the treatment of Doctor Clews, his stories stopped abruptly and he began to lament the wastry of his life. If the thing had been better acted I might have been impressed, for our follies never look just like what they are till we are finally on the broad of our backs and the Fell Sergeant’s step is at the door. But it was not well acted; and when the wicked Uncle Andrew groaned over the very ploys he had a week ago exulted in, I recognised some of my mother’s commonest sentiments in his sideways sermon. She had got her quondam Andy, for lang syne’s sake, to help her keep her son at home; and he was doing his best, poor man, but a trifle late in the day.

“Uncle Andrew,” said I, never heeding his homily, “tell me what came of the pock-marked tobacco planter when you and the negro lay in the swamp for him?”

He groaned hopelessly.

“A rotten tale, Paul, my lad,” said he, never looking me in the face; “I rue the day I was mixed up in that affair.”

“But it was a good story so far as it went, no further gone than Wednesday last,” I protested.

He laughed at that, and for half an hour he put off the new man of my mother’s bidding, and we were on the old naughty footing again. He concluded by bequeathing to me for the twentieth time the brass-bound chest, and its contents that we had never seen nor could guess the nature of. But now for the first time he let me know what I might expect there.

“It’s not what Quentin might consider much,” said he, “for there’s not a guelder of money in it, no, nor so little as a groat, for as the world’s divided ye can’t have both the money and the dance, and I was aye the fellow for the dance. There’s scarcely anything in it, Paul, but the trash – ahem! – that is the very fitting reward of a life like mine.”

“And still and on, uncle,” said I, “it is a very good tale about the pock-marked man.”

“Ah! You’re there, Greig!” cried the rogue, laughing till his hoast came to nigh choke him. “Well, the kist’s yours, anyway, such as it is; and there’s but one thing in it – to be strict, a pair – that I set any store by as worth leaving to my nephew.”

“It ought to be spurs,” said I, “to drive me out of this lamentable countryside and to where a fellow might be doing something worth while.”

“Eh!” he cried, “you’re no’ so far off it, for it’s a pair of shoes.”

“A pair of shoes!” I repeated, half inclined to think that Uncle Andrew was doited at last.

“A pair of shoes, and perhaps in some need of the cobbler, for I have worn them a good deal since I got them in Madras. They were not new when I got them, but by the look of them they’re not a day older now. They have got me out of some unco’ plights in different parts of the world, for all that the man who sold them to me at a bonny penny called them the Shoes of Sorrow; and so far as I ken, the virtue’s in them yet.”

“A doomed man’s whim,” thought I, and professed myself vastly gratified by his gift.

He died next morning. It was Candlemas Day. He went out at last like a crusie wanting oil. In the morning he had sat up in bed to sup porridge that, following a practice I had made before his reminiscences concluded, I had taken in to him myself. Tremendous long and lean the upper part of him looked, and the cicatrice upon his brow made his ghastliness the more appalling. When he sat against the bolsters he could see through the window into the holm field, and, as it happened, what was there but a wild young roe-deer driven down from some higher part of the country by stress of winter weather, and a couple of mongrel dogs keeping him at bay in an angle of the fail dyke.

I have seldom seen a man more vastly moved than Uncle Andrew looking upon this tragedy of the wilds. He gasped as though his chest would crack, a sweat burst on his face.

“That’s – that’s the end o’t, Paul, my lad!” said he. “Yonder’s your roving uncle, and the tykes have got him cornered at last. No more the heather and the brae; no more – no more – no more – ”

Such a change came on him that I ran and cried my mother ben, and she and father were soon at his bedside.

It was to her he turned his eyes, that had seen so much of the spacious world of men and women and all their multifarious interests, great and little. They shone with a light of memory and affection, so that I got there and then a glimpse of the Uncle Andrew of innocence and the Uncle Andrew who might have been if fate had had it otherwise.

He put out his hand and took hers, and said goodbye.

“The hounds have me, Katrine,” said he. “I’m at the fail dyke corner.”

“I’ll go out and whistle them off, uncle,” said I, fancying it all a doited man’s illusion, though the look of death was on him; but I stood rebuked in the frank gaze he gave me of a fuller comprehension than mine, though he answered me not.

And then he took my father’s hand in his other, and to him too he said farewell.

“You’re there, Quentin!” said he; “and Katrine – Katrine – Katrine chose by far the better man. God be merciful to poor Andy Greig, a sinner.” And these were his last words.

CHAPTER V

A SPOILED TRYST, AND OTHER THINGS THAT FOLLOWED ON THE OPENING OF THE CHEST

The funeral was over before I cared to examine my bequest, and then I went to it with some reluctance, for if a pair of shoes was the chief contents of the brass-bound chest, there was like to be little else except the melancholy relics of a botched life. It lay where he left it on the night he came – under the foot of his bed – and when I lifted the lid I felt as if I was spying upon a man through a keyhole. Yet, when I came more minutely to examine the contents, I was disappointed that at the first reflection nothing was there half so pregnant as his own most casual tale to rouse in me the pleasant excitation of romance.

A bairn’s caul – that sailor’s trophy that has kept many a mariner from drowning only that he might die a less pleasant death; a broken handcuff, whose meaning I cared not to guess at; a pop or pistol; a chap-book of country ballads, that possibly solaced his exile from the land they were mostly written about; the batters of a Bible, with nothing between them but his name in his mother’s hand on the inside of the board; a traveller’s log or itinerary, covering a period of fifteen years, extremely minute in its detail and well written; a broken sixpence and the pair of shoes.

The broken sixpence moved my mother to tears, for she had had the other half twenty years ago, before Andrew Greig grew ne’er-do-weel; the shoes failed to rouse in her or in my father any interest whatever. If they could have guessed it, they would have taken them there and then and sunk them in the deepest linn of Earn.

There was little kenspeckle about them saving their colour, which was a dull dark red. They were of the most excellent material, with a great deal of fine sewing thrown away upon them in parts where it seems to me their endurance was in no wise benefited, and an odd pair of silver buckles gave at your second glance a foreign look to them.

I put them on at the first opportunity: they fitted me as if my feet had been moulded to them, and I sat down to the study of the log-book. The afternoon passed, the dusk came. I lit a candle, and at midnight, when I reached the year of my uncle’s escape from the Jesuits of Spain, I came to myself gasping, to find the house in an alarm, and that lanthorns were out about Earn Water looking for me, while all the time I was perdu in the dead uncle’s chamber in the baron’s wing, as we called it, of Hazel Den House. I pretended I had fallen asleep; it was the first and the last time I lied to my mother, and something told me she knew I was deceiving her. She looked at the red shoes on my feet.

“Ugly brogues!” said she; “it’s a wonder to me you would put them on your feet. You don’t know who has worn them.”

“They were Uncle Andy’s,” said I, complacently looking at them, for they fitted like a glove; the colour was hardly noticeable in the evening, and the buckles were most becoming.

“Ay! and many a one before him, I’m sure,” said she, with distaste in her tone, “I don’t think them nice at all, Paul,” and she shuddered a little.

“That’s but a freit,” said I; “but it’s not likely I’ll wear much of such a legacy.” I went up and left them in the chest, and took the diary into my own room and read Uncle Andrew’s marvellous adventures in the trade of rover till it was broad daylight.

When I had come to the conclusion it seemed as if I had been in the delirium of a fever, so tempestuous and unreal was that memoir of a wild loose life. The sea was there, buffeting among the pages in rollers and breakers; there were the chronicles of a hundred ports, with boozing kens and raving lazarettos in them; far out isles and cays in nameless oceans, and dozing lagoons below tropic skies; a great clash of weapons and a bewildering deal of political intrigue in every part of the Continent from Calais to Constantinople. My uncle’s narrative in life had not hinted at one half the marvel of his career, and I read his pages with a rapture, as one hears a noble piece of music, fascinated to the uttermost, and finding no moral at the end beyond that the world we most of us live in with innocence and ignorance is a crust over tremendous depths. And then I burned the book. It went up in a grey smoke on the top of the fire that I had kept going all night for its perusal; and the thing was no sooner done than I regretted it, though the act was dictated by the seemly enough idea that its contents would only distress my parents if they came to their knowledge.

For days – for weeks – for a season – I went about, my head humming with Uncle Andy’s voice recounting the most stirring of his adventures as narrated in the log-book. I had been infected by almost his first words the night he came to Hazel Den House, and made a magic chant of the mere names of foreign peoples; now I was fevered indeed; and when I put on the red shoes (as I did of an evening, impelled by some dandyism foreign to my nature hitherto), they were like the seven-league boots for magic, as they set my imagination into every harbour Uncle Andy had frequented and made me a guest at every inn where he had met his boon companions.

I was wearing them the next time I went on my excursion to Earn side and there met Isobel Fortune, who had kept away from the place since I had smiled at my discovery of her tryst with Hervey’s “Meditations.” She came upon me unexpectedly, when the gentility of my shoes and the recollection of all that they had borne of manliness was making me walk along the road with a very high head and an unusually jaunty step.

She seemed struck as she came near, with her face displaying her confusion, and it seemed to me she was a new woman altogether – at least, not the Isobel I had been at school with and seen with an indifferent eye grow up like myself from pinafores. It seemed suddenly scandalous that the like of her should have any correspondence with so ill-suited a lover as David Borland of the Dreipps.

For the first time (except for the unhappy introduction of Hervey’s “Meditations”) we stopped to speak to each other. She was the most bewitching mixture of smiles and blushes, and stammering now and then, and vastly eager to be pleasant to me, and thinks I, “My lass, you’re keen on trysting when it’s with Borland.”

The very thought of the fellow in that connection made me angry in her interest; and with a mischievous intention of spoiling his sport if he hovered, as I fancied, in the neighbourhood, or at least of delaying his happiness as long as I could, I kept the conversation going very blithe indeed.

She had a laugh, low and brief, and above all sincere, which is the great thing in laughter, that was more pleasant to hear than the sound of Earn in its tinkling hollow among the ferns: it surprised me that she should favour my studied and stupid jocosities with it so frequently. Here was appreciation! I took, in twenty minutes, a better conceit of myself, than the folks at home could have given me in the twelve months since I left the college, and I’ll swear to this date ‘twas the consciousness of my fancy shoes that put me in such good key.

She saw my glance to them at last complacently, and pretended herself to notice them for the first time.

She smiled – little hollows came near the corners of her lips; of a sudden I minded having once kissed Mistress Grant’s niece in a stair-head frolic in Glasgow High Street, and the experience had been pleasant enough.

“They’re very nice,” said Isobel.

“They’re all that,” said I, gazing boldly at her dimples. She flushed and drew in her lips.

“No, no!” I cried, ”’twas not them I was thinking of; but their neighbours. I never saw you had dimples before.”

At that she was redder than ever.

“I could not help that, Paul,” said she; “they have been always there, and you are getting very audacious. I was thinking of your new shoes.”