The Shoes of Fortune

I saw the world, so much of it as lies in Prussia, and may be witnessed from the ranks of a marching regiment of the line; I saw life – the life of the tent and the bivouac, and the unforgettable thing of it was death – death in the stricken field among the grinding hoofs of horses, below the flying wheels of the artillery.

And yet if I had had love there – some friend to talk to when the splendour of things filled me; the consciousness of a kind eye to share the pleasure of a sunshine or to light at a common memory; or if I had had hope, the prospect of brighter days and a restitution of my self-respect, they might have been much happier these marching days that I am now only too willing to forget. For we trod in many pleasant places even when weary, by summer fields jocund with flowers, and by autumn’s laden orchards. Stars shone on our wearied columns as we rested in the meadows or on the verge of woods, half satisfied with a gangrel’s supper and sometimes joining in a song. I used to feel then that here was a better society after all than some I had of late been habituated with upon the coast. And there were towns we passed through: ‘twas sweet exceedingly to hear the echo of our own loud drums, the tarantara of trumpets. I liked to see the folks come out although they scarce were friendly, and feel that priceless zest that is the guerdon of the corps, the crowd, the mob – that I was something in a vastly moving thing even if it was no more than the regiment of raw lads called d’Auvergne.

We were, for long in our progress, no part of the main army, some strategy of which we could not guess the reasoning, making it necessary that we should move alone through the country; and to the interest of our progress through these foreign scenes was added the ofttimes apprehension that we might some day suffer an alarm from the regiments of the great Frederick. Twice we were surprised by night and our pickets broken in, once a native guided us to a guet-apens– an ambuscade – where, to do him justice, the major fought like a lion, and by his spirit released his corps from the utmost danger. A war is like a harvest; you cannot aye be leading in, though the common notion is that in a campaign men are fighting even-on. In the cornfield the work depends upon the weather; in the field of war (at least with us ‘twas so) the actual strife must often depend upon the enemy, and for weeks on end we saw them neither tail nor horn, as the saying goes. Sometimes it seemed as if the war had quite forgotten us, and was waging somewhere else upon the planet far away from Prussia.

We got one good from the marching and the waiting; it put vigour in our men. Day by day they seemed to swell and strengthen, thin faces grew well-filled and ruddy, slouching steps grew confident and firm. And thus the Regiment d’Au-vergne was not so badly figured when we fought the fight of Rosbach that ended my career of glory.

Rosbach! – its name to me can still create a tremor. We fought it in November month in a storm of driving snow. Our corps lay out upon the right of Frederick among fields that were new-ploughed for wheat and broken up by ditches. The d’Auvergnes charged with all the fire of veterans; they were smashed by horse, but rose and fell and rose again though death swept across them like breath from a furnace, scorching and shrivelling all before it. The Prussian and the Austrian guns went rat-a-pat like some gigantic drum upon the braes, and nearer the musketry volleys mingled with the plunge of horse and shouting of commanders so that each sound individually was indistinguishable, but all was blended in one unceasing melancholy hum.

That drumming on the braes and that long melancholy hum are what most vividly remains to me of Rosbach, for I fell early in the engagement, struck in the charge by the sabre of a Prussian horseman that cleft me to the skull in a slanting stroke and left me incapable, but not unconscious, on the field.

I lay for hours with other wounded in the snow The battle changed ground; the noises came from the distance: we seemed to be forgotten. I pitied myself exceedingly. Finally I swounded.

When I came to myself it was night and men with lanterns were moving about the fields gathering us in like blackcock where we lay. Two Frenchmen came up and spoke to me, but what they said was all beyond me for I had clean forgotten every word of their language though that morning I had known it scarcely less fully than my own. I tried to speak in French, it seems, and thought I did so, but in spite of me the words were the broadest lallands Scots such as I had not used since I had run, a bare-legged boy, about the braes of, home. And otherwise my faculties were singularly acute, for I remember how keenly I noticed the pitying eye of the younger of the two men.

What they did was to stanch my wound and go away. I feared I was deserted, but by-and-by they returned with another man who held the lantern close to my face as he knelt beside me.

“By the black stones of Baillinish!” said he in an unmistakable Hielan’ accent, “and what have I here the night but the boy that harmed the bylie? You were not in your mother’s bosom when you got that stroke!”

I saw his smile in the light of his lanthom, ‘twas no other than MacKellar of Kilbride!

He was a surgeon in one of the corps; had been busy at his trade in another part of the field when the two Frenchmen who had recognised me for a Scot had called him away to look to a compatriot.

Under charge of Kilbride (as, in our country fashion, I called him) I was taken in a waggon with several other wounded soldiers over the frontier into Holland, that was, perhaps, the one unvexed part of all the Continent of Europe in these stirring days.

I mended rapidly, and cheery enough were these days of travel in a cart, so cheery that I never considered what the end of them might be, but was content to sit in the sunshine blithely conversing with this odd surgeon of the French army who had been roving the world for twenty years like my own Uncle Andrew, and had seen service in every army in Europe, but yet hankered to get back to the glens of his nativity, where he hoped his connection with the affair of Tearlach and the Forty-five would be forgotten.

“It’s just this way of it, Hazel Den,” he would say to me, “there’s them that has got enough out of Tearlach to make it worth their while to stick by him and them that has not. I am of the latter. I have been hanging about Paris yonder for a twelvemonth on the promise of the body that I should have a post that suited with my talents, and what does he do but get me clapped into a scurvy regiment that goes trudging through Silesia since Whitsunday, with never a sign of the paymaster except the once and then no more than a tenth of what was due to me. It is, maybe, glory, as the other man said; but my sorrow, it is not the kind that makes a clinking in your pouches.”

He had a comfortable deal of money to have so poor an account of his paymaster, and at that I hinted.

“Oh! Allow me for that!” he cried with great amusement at my wonder. “Fast hand at a feast and fast feet at a foray is what the other man said, and I’m thinking it is a very good observation, too. Where would I be if I was lippening on the paymaster?”

“Man! you surely have not been stealing?” said I, with such great innocency that he laughed like to end.

“Stealing!” he cried. “It’s no theft to lift a purse in an enemy’s country.”

“But these were no enemies of yours?” I protested, “though you happen to be doctoring in their midst.”

“Tuts! tuts, man!” said he shortly. “When the conies quarrel the quirky one (and that’s Sir Fox if ye like to ken) will get his own. There seems far too much delicacy about you, my friend, to be a sporran-soldier fighting for the best terms an army will give you. And what for need you grumble at my having found a purse in an empty house when it’s by virtue of the same we’re at this moment making our way to the sea?”

I could make no answer to that, for indeed I had had, like the other three wounded men in the cart with me, the full benefit of his purse, wherever he had found it, and but for that we had doubtless been mouldering in a Prussian prison.

It will be observed that MacKellar spoke of our making for the sea, and here it behoves that I should tell how that project arose.

When we had crossed the frontier the first time it was simply because it seemed the easiest way out of trouble, though it led us away from the remnants of the army. I had commented upon this the first night we stopped within the Netherlands, and the surgeon bluntly gave me his mind on the matter. The truth was, he said, that he was sick of his post and meant to make this the opportunity of getting quit of it.

I went as close as I dared upon a hint that the thing looked woundily like a desertion. He picked me up quick enough and counselled me to follow his example, and say farewell to so scurvy a service as that I had embarked on. His advices might have weighed less with me (though in truth I was sick enough of the Regiment d’Auvergne and a succession of defeats) if he had not told me that there was a certain man at Helvoetsluys he knew I should like to see.

“And who might that be?” I asked.

“Who but his reverence himself?” said Kilbride, who dearly loved an effect. “Yon night I met you in the Paris change-house it was planned by them I was with, one of them being Buhot himself of the police, that the old man must be driven out of his nest in the Hôtel Dieu, seeing they had got all the information they wanted from him, and I was one of the parties who was to carry this into effect. At the time I fancied Buhot was as keen upon yourself as upon the priest, and I thought I was doing a wonderfully clever thing to spy your red shoes and give you a warning to quit the priest, but all the time Buhot was only laughing at me, and saw you and recognised you himself in the change-house. Well, to make the long tale short, when we went to the hospital the birds were both of them gone, which was more than we bargained for, because some sort of trial was due to the priest though there was no great feeling against him. Where he had taken wing to we could not guess, but you will not hinder him to come on a night of nights (as we say) to the lodging I was tenanting at the time in the Rue Espade, and throw himself upon my mercy. The muckle hash! I’ll allow the insolency of the thing tickled me greatly. The man was a fair object, too; had not tasted food for two days, and captured my fancy by a tale I suppose there is no trusting, that he had given you the last few livres he had in the world.”

“That was true enough about the livres,” I said with gratitude.

“Was it, faith?” cried Kilbride. “Then I’m glad I did him the little service that lay in my power, which was to give him enough money to pay for posting to Helvoetsluys, where he is now, and grateful enough so far as I could gather from the last letters I had from him, and also mighty anxious to learn what became of his secretary.”

“I would give the last plack in my pocket to see the creature,” said I.

“Would you indeed?” said Kilbride. “Then here’s the road for you, and it must be a long furlough whatever of it from the brigade of Marshal Clermont.”

CHAPTER XXXV

BRINGS ME TO HELVOETSLUYS IN WINTER WEATHER

Kilbride and I parted company with the others once we had got within the lines of Holland; the cateran (as I would sometimes be calling him in a joke) giving them as much money as might take them leisuredly to the south they meant to make for, and he and I proceeded on our way across the country towards the mouth of the River Maas.

It was never my lot before nor since to travel with a more cheerful companion. Not the priest himself had greater humour in his composition, and what was more it was a jollity I was able the better to understand, for while much of Hamilton’s esprit missed the spark with me because it had a foreign savour, the pawkiness of Kilbride was just the marrow of that I had seen in folks at home. And still the man was strange, for often he had melancholies. Put him in a day of rain and wind and you would hear him singing like a laverock the daftest songs in Erse; or give him a tickle task at haggling in the language of signs with a broad-bottomed bargeman, or the driver of a rattel-van, and the fun would froth in him like froth on boiling milk.

Indeed, and I should say like cream, for this Mac-Kellar man had, what is common enough among the clans in spite of our miscalling, a heart of jeel for the tender moment and a heart of iron for the hard. But black, black, were his vapours when the sun shone, which is surely the poorest of excuses for dolours. I think he hated the flatness of the land we travelled in. To me it was none amiss, for though it was winter I could fancy how rich would be the grass of July in the polders compared with our poor stunted crops at home, and that has ever a cheerful influence on any man that has been bred in Lowland fields. But he (if I did not misread his eye) looked all ungratefully on the stretching leagues that ever opened before us as we sailed on waterways or jolted on the roads.

“I do not ken how it may be with you, Mr. Greig,” he said one day as, somewhere in Brabant, our sluggish vessel opened up a view of canal that seemed to stretch so far it pricked the eye of the setting sun, and the windmills whirled on either hand ridiculous like the games of children – “I do not ken how it may be with you, but I’m sick of this country. It’s no better nor a bannock, and me so fond of Badenoch!”

“Indeed and there’s a sameness about every part of it,” I confessed, “and yet it has its qualities. See the sun on yonder island – ‘tis pleasant enough to my notion, and as for the folk, they are not the cut of our own, but still they have very much in common with folks I’ve seen in Ayr.”

He frowned at that unbelievingly, and cast a sour eye upon some women that stood upon a bridge. “Troth!” said he, “you would not compare these limmers with our own. I have not seen a light foot and a right dark eye since ever I put the back of me to the town of Inverness in the year of ‘Fifty-six.’”

“Nor I since I left the Mearns,” I cried, suddenly thinking of Isobel and forgetting all that lay between that lass and me.

“Oh! oh!” cried Kilbride. “And that’s the way of it? Therms more than Clemie Walkinshaw, is there? I was ill to convince that a nephew of Andy Greig’s began the game at the age of twenty-odd with a lady that might have been his mother.”

I felt very much ashamed that he should have any knowledge of this part of my history, and seeing it he took to bantering me.

“Come, come!” said he, “you must save my reputation with myself for penetration, for I aye argued with Buhot that your tanglement with madame was something short of innocency for all your mim look, and he was for swearing the lady had found a fool.”

“I am beat to understand how my affairs came to be the topic of dispute with you and Buhot?” said I, astonished.

“And what for no’?” said he. “Wasn’t the man’s business to find out things, and would you have me with no interest in a ploy when it turned up? There were but the two ways of it – you were all the gomeral in love that Buhot thought you, or you were Andy Greig’s nephew and willing to win the woman’s favour (for all her antiquity) by keeping Buhot in the news of Hamilton’s movements.”

“Good God!” I cried, “that was a horrible alternative!” even then failing to grasp all that he implied.

“Maybe,” he said pawkily; “but you cannot deny you kept them very well informed upon your master’s movements, otherwise it had gone very hard perhaps with his Royal Highness.”

“Me!” I cried. “I would have as soon informed upon my father. And who was there to inform?”

Kilbride looked at me curiously as if he half doubted my innocence. “It is seldom I have found the man Buhot in a lie of the sort,” said he, “but he led me to understand that what information he had of the movements of the priest came from yourself.”

I jumped to my feet, and almost choked in denying it.