The Shoes of Fortune

Then I told him it had been in my mind ever since I had seen the Minister to go to Edinburgh and give myself up to the authorities.

“Are ye daft?” he cried, astonished.

I could only shrug my shoulders at that.

“Perhaps you fancy this business of the invasion will help you to get your neck out of the loop? I would not lippen on a Government for ten minutes. You have saved the country – that’s the long and the short of it; now you must just be saving your own hide. There’s nothing for us but the Continent again, and whether you’re in the key for that or not, here’s a fellow will sleep uneasy till he has Europe under his head.”

Even at the cost of parting with Kilbride I determined to carry out my intention of going to Edinburgh. With the priest gone, no prospect of Mr. Pitt taking the first step, and Kilbride in the humour for a retreat, I decided that the sooner I brought matters to a head the better.

There was a mail coach that went north weekly. It took a considerable deal of money and a fortnight of time to make the journey between the two capitals, but MacKellar, free-handed to the last, lent me the money (which I sent him six months later to Holland), and I set out one Saturday from the “Bull and Whistle” in a genteel two-end spring machine that made a brisk passage – the weather considered – as far as York on our way into Scotland.

I left on a night of jubilation for the close of the war and the overthrow of Conflans. Bonfires blazed on the river-side and the eminences round the city; candles were in every window, the people were huzzaing in the streets where I left behind me only the one kent face – that of MacKellar of Kilbride who came to the coach to see the last of me. And everywhere was the snow – deep, silent, apparently enduring.

CHAPTER XLII

I DEPART IN THE MIDST OF ILLUMINATION AND COME TO A JAIL, BAD NEWS, AND AN OLD ENEMY

We carried this elation all through England with us. Whatever town we stopped at flags were flying, and the oldest resident must be tipsy on the green for the glory of the British Isles. The seven passengers who occupied the coach with me found in these rejoicings, and in the great event which gave rise to them, subjects of unending discourse as we dragged through the country in the wake of steaming horses. There was with us a maker of perukes that had found trade dull in Town (as they call it), and planned to start business in York; a widow woman who had buried her second husband and was returning to her parents in Northumberland with a sprightliness that told she was ready to try a third if he offered; and a squire (as they call a laird) of Morpeth.

But for the common interest in the rejoicings it might have been a week before the company thawed to each other enough to start a conversation. The first mile of the journey, however, found us in the briskest clebate on Hawke and his doings. I say us, but in truth my own share in the conversation was very small as I had more serious reflections.

The perruquier, as was natural to his trade, knew everything and itched to prove it.

“I have it on the very best authority,” he would say, “indeed” – with a whisper for all the passengers as if he feared the toiling horses outside might hear him – “indeed between ourselves I do not mind telling that it was from Sir Patrick Dall’s man – that the French would have been on top of us had not one of themselves sold the plot for a hatful of guineas.”

“That is not what I heard at all,” broke in the squire. “I fancy you are mistaken, sir. The truth, as I have every reason to believe, is that one of the spies of the Government – a Scotsman, by all accounts – discovered Conflans’ plans, and came over to London with them. A good business too, egad! otherwise we’d soon have nothing to eat at Morpeth George Inn on market days but frogs, and would find the parley-voos overrunning the country by next Lent with their masses and mistresses, and so on. A good business for merry old England that this spy had his English ears open.”

“It may be you are right, sir,” conceded the perruquier deferentially. “Now that I remember, Sir Patrick’s gentleman said something of the same kind, and that it was one of them Scotsmen brought the news. Like enough the fellow found it worth his while. It will be a pretty penny in his pocket, I’ll wager. He’ll be able to give up spying and start an inn.”

I have little doubt the ideal nature of retirement to an inn came to the mind of the peruke maker from the fact that at the moment we were drawing up before “The Crown” at Bawtry. Reek rose in clouds from the horses, as could be seen from the light of the doors that showed the narrow street knee-deep in snow; a pleasant smell of cooking supper and warm cordials came out to us, welcome enough it may be guessed after our long day’s stage. The widow clung just a trifle too long on my arm as I gallantly helped her out of the coach; perhaps she thought my silence and my abstracted gaze at her for the last hour or two betrayed a tender interest, but I was thinking how close the squire and the wig-maker had come upon the truth, and yet made one mistake in that part of their tale that most closely affected their silent fellow passenger.

The sea-fight and the war lasted us for a topic all through England, but when we had got into Scotland on the seventh day after my departure from London, the hostlers at the various change-houses yoked fresh horses to the tune of “Daniel Risk.”

We travelled in the most tempestuous weather. Snow fell incessantly, and was cast in drifts along the road; sometimes it looked as if we were bound for days, but we carried the mails, and with gigantic toil the driver pushed us through.

The nearer we got to Edinburgh the more we learned of the notorious Daniel Risk, whom no one knew better than myself. The charge of losing his ship wilfully was, it appeared, among the oldest and least heinous of his crimes. Smuggling had engaged his talent since then, and he had murdered a cabin-boy under the most revolting circumstances. He had almost escaped the charge of scuttling the Seven Sisters, for it was not till he had been in the dock for the murder that evidence of that transaction came from the seaman Horn, who had been wrecked twice, it appeared, and far in other parts of the world between the time he was abandoned in the scuttled ship and returned to his native land, to tell how the ruffian had left two innocent men to perish.

Even in these days of wild happenings the fame of Risk exceeded that of every malefactor that season, and when we got to Edinburgh the street singers were chanting doleful ballads about him.

I would have given the wretch no thought, or very little, for my own affairs were heavy enough, had not the very day I landed in Edinburgh seen a broad-sheet published with “The Last Words and Warning” of Risk. The last words were in an extraordinarily devout spirit; the homily breathed what seemed a real repentance for a very black life. It would have moved me less if I could have learned then, as I did later, that the whole thing was the invention of some drunken lawyer’s clerk in the Canongate, who had probably devised scores of such fictions for the entertainment of the world that likes to read of scaffold repentances and of wicked lives. The condition of the wretch touched me, and I made up my mind to see the condemned man who, by the accounts of the journals, was being visited daily by folks interested in his forlorn case.

With some manoeuvring I got outside the bars of his cell.

There was little change in him. The same wild aspect was there though he pretended a humility. The skellie eye still roved with little of the love of God or man in it; his iron-grey hair hung tawted about his temples. Only his face was changed and had the jail-white of the cells, for he had been nearly two months in confinement. When I entered he did not know me; indeed, he scarce looked the road I was on at first, but applied himself zealously to the study of a book wherein he pretended to be rapturously engrossed.

The fact that the Bible (for so it was) happened to be upside down in his hands somewhat staggered my faith in the repentance of Daniel Risk, who, I remembered, had never numbered reading among his arts.

I addressed him as Captain.

“I am no Captain,” said he in a whine, “but plain Dan Risk, the blackest sinner under the cope and canopy of heaven.” And he applied himself to his volume as before.

“Do you know me?” I asked, and he must have found the voice familiar, for he rose from his stool, approached the bars of his cage, and examined me. “Andy Greigs nephew!” he cried. “It’s you; I hope you’re a guid man?”

“I might be the best of men – and that’s a dead one – so far as you are concerned,” I replied, stung a little by the impertinence of him.

“The hand of Providence saved me that last item in my bloody list o’ crimes,” said he, with a singular mixture of the whine for his sins and of pride in their number. “Your life was spared, I mak’ nae doubt, that ye micht repent o’ your past, and I’m sorry to see ye in sic fallals o’ dress, betokenin’ a licht mind and a surrender to the vanities.”

My dress was scantily different from what it had been on the Seven Sisters, except for some lace, my tied hair, and a sword.

“Indeed, and I am in anything but a light frame of mind, Captain Risk,” I said. “There are reasons for that, apart from seeing you in this condition which I honestly deplore in spite of all the wrong you did me.”

“I thank God that has been forgiven me,” he said, with a hypocritical cock of his hale eye. “I was lost in sin, a child o’ the deevil, but noo I am made clean,” and much more of the same sort that it is unnecessary herp to repeat.

“You can count on my forgiveness, so far as that goes,” I said, disgusted with his manner.

“I’m greatly obleeged,” said he, “but man’s forgiveness doesna coont sae muckle as a preen, and I would ask ye to see hoo it stands wi’ yersel’, Daniel Risk has made his peace wi’ his Maker, but what way is it wi’ the nephew o’ Andrew Greig?”

“It ill becomes a man in a condemned cell to be preacher to those outside of it,” I told him in some exasperation at his presumption.

He threw up his hands and glowered at me with his gleed eye looking seven ways for sixpence as the saying goes.

“Dinna craw ower crouse, young man,” he said. “Whit brings ye here I canna guess, but I ken that you that’s there should be in here where I am, for there’s blood on your hands.”

He had me there! Oh, yes, he had me there! Every vein in my body told me so. But I was not in the humour to make an admission of that kind to this creature.

“I have no conceit of myself in any respect whatever, Daniel Risk,” I said slowly. “I came here from France but yesterday after experiences there that paid pretty well for my boy’s crime, for I have heard from neither kith nor kin since you cozened me on the boards of the Seven Sisters.”

He put his hands upon the bars and looked at me. He wore a prison garb of the most horrible colour, and there were round him the foul stenches of the cell.

“Ay!” said he. “New back! And they havena nabbed ye yet! Weel, they’ll no’ be lang, maybe, o’ doin’ that, for I’ll warrant ye’ve been advertised plenty aboot the country; ony man that has read a gazette or clattered in a public-hoose kens your description and the blackness o’ the deed you’re chairged wi’. All I did was to sink a bit ship that was rotten onyway, mak’ free trade wi’ a few ankers o’ brandy that wad hae been drunk by the best i’ the land includin’ the very lords that tried me, and accidentally kill a lad that sair needed a beltin’ to gar him dae his honest wark. But you shot a man deliberate and his blood is crying frae the grund. If ye hurry ye’ll maybe dance on naethin’ sooner nor mysel’.”

There was so much impotent venom in what he said that I lost my anger with the wretch drawing near his end, and looked on him with pity. It seemed to annoy him more than if I had reviled him.

“I’m a white soul.” says he, clasping his hands – the most arrant blasphemy of a gesture from one whose deeds were desperately wicked! “I’m a white soul, praise God! and value not your opinions a docken leaf. Ye micht hae come here to this melancholy place to slip a bit guinea into my hand for some few extra comforts, instead o’ which it’s jist to anger me.”

He glued his cheek against the bars and stared at me from head to foot, catching at the last a glance of my fateful shoes. He pointed at them with a rigid finger.

“Man! man!” he cried, “there’s the sign and token o’ the lot o’ ye – the bloody shoon. They may weel be red for him and you that wore them. Red shoon! red shoon!” He stopped suddenly. “After a’,” said he, “I bear ye nae ill-will, though I hae but to pass the word to the warder on the ither side o’ the rails. And oh! abin a’ repent – ” He was off again into one of his blasphemies, for at my elbow now was an old lady who was doubtless come to confirm the conversion of Daniel Risk. I turned to go.

He cast his unaffected eye piously heavenward, and coolly offered up a brief prayer for “this erring young brother determined on the ways of vice and folly.”

It may be scarce credible that I went forth from the condemned cell with the most shaken mind I had had since the day I fled from the moor of Mearns. The streets were thronged with citizens; the castle ramparts rose up white and fine, the bastions touched by sunset fires, a window blazing like a star. Above the muffled valley, clear, silvery, proud, rang a trumpet on the walls, reminding me of many a morning rouse in far Silesia. Was I not better there? Why should I be the sentimental fool and run my head into a noose? Risk, whom I had gone to see in pity, paid me with a vengeance! He had put into the blunt language of the world all the horror I had never heard in words before, though it had often been in my mind. I saw myself for the first time the hunted outlaw, captured at last. “You that’s out there should be in where I am!” It was true! But to sit for weeks in that foul hole within the iron rail, waiting on doom, reflecting on my folks disgraced – I could not bear it!

Risk cured me of my intention to hazard all on the flimsy chance of a Government’s gratitude, and I made up my mind to seek safety and forgetfulness again in flight to another country.

CHAPTER XLIII

BACK TO THE MOORLAND