The Shoes of Fortune

“The road to hell suits one shoe as well’s another,” said I bitterly; “where the sorrow lies is that ye never saw me go out with a different heart. Mother, mother, the worst ye can guess is no’ so bad as the worst ye’ve yet to hear of your son.”

I was in a storm of roaring emotions, yet her next words startled me.

“It’s Isobel Fortune of the Kirkillstane,” she said, trying hard to smile with a wan face in the candle light.

“It was– poor dear! Am I not in torment when I think that she must know it?”

“I thought it was that that ailed ye, Paul,” said she, as if she were relieved. “Look; I got this a little ago on the bleaching-green – this scrap of paper in your write and her name upon it. Maybe I should not have read it.” And she handed me part of that ardent ballad I had torn less than an hour ago.

I held it in the flame of her candle till it was gone, our hands all trembling, and “That’s the end appointed for Paul Greig,” said I.

“Oh, Paul, Paul, it cannot be so unco’!” she cried in terror, and clutched me at the arm.

“It is – it is the worst.”

“And yet – and yet – you’re my son, Paul. Tell me.”

She looked so like a reed in the winter wind, so frail and little and shivering in my room, that I dared not tell her there and then. I said it was better that both father and she should hear my tale together, and we went into the room where already he was bedded but not asleep. He sat up staring at our entry, a night-cowl tassel dangling on his brow.

“There’s a man dead – ” I began, when he checked me with a shout.

“Stop, stop!” he cried, and put my mother in a chair. “I have heard the tale before with my brother Andy, and the end was not for women’s ears.”

“I must know, Quentin,” said his wife, blanched to the lip but determined, and then he put his arm about her waist. It seemed like a second murder to wrench those tender hearts that loved me, but the thing was bound to do.

I poured out my tale at one breath and in one sentence, and when it ended my mother was in her swound.

“Oh, Paul!” cried the poor man, his face like a clout; “black was the day she gave you birth!”

CHAPTER VII

QUENTIN GREIG LOSES A SON, AND I SET OUT WITH A HORSE AS ALL MY FORTUNE

He pushed me from the chamber as I had been a stranger intruding, and I went to the trance door and looked out at the stretching moorlands lit by an enormous moon that rose over Cathkin Braes, and an immensity of stars. For the first time in all my life I realised the heedlessness of nature in human affairs the most momentous. For the moon swung up serene beyond expression; the stars winked merrily: a late bird glid among the bushes and perched momentarily on a bough of ash to pipe briefly almost with the passion of the spring. But not the heedlessness of nature influenced me so much as the barren prospect of the world that the moon and stars revealed. There was no one out there in those deep spaces of darkness I could claim as friend or familiar. Where was I to go? What was I to do? Only the beginnings of schemes came to me – schemes of concealment and disguise, of surrender even – but the last to be dismissed as soon as it occurred to me, for how could I leave this house the bitter bequest of a memory of the gallows-tree?

Only the beginnings, I say, for every scheme ran tilt against the obvious truth that I was not only without affection or regard out there, but without as much as a crown of money to purchase the semblance of either.

I could not have stood very long there when my father came out, his face like clay, and aged miraculously, and beckoned me to the parlour.

“Your mother – my wife,” said he, “is very ill, and I am sending for the doctor. The horse is yoking. There is another woman in Driepps who – God help her! – will be no better this night, but I wish in truth her case was ours, and that it was you who lay among the heather.”

He began pacing up and down the floor, his eyes bent, his hands continually wringing, his heart bursting, as it were, with sighs and the dry sobs of the utmost wretchedness. As for me, I must have been clean gyte (as the saying goes), for my attention was mostly taken up with the tassel of his nightcap that bobbed grotesquely on his brow. I had not seen it since, as a child, I used to share his room.

“What! what!” he cried at last piteously, “have ye never a word to say? Are ye dumb?” He ran at me and caught me by the collar of the coat and tried to shake me in an anger, but I felt it no more than I had been a stone.

“What did ye do it for? What in heaven’s name did ye quarrel on?”

“It was – it was about a girl,” I said, reddening even at that momentous hour to speak of such a thing to him.

“A girl!” he repeated, tossing up his hands. “Keep us! Hoo lang are ye oot o’ daidlies? Well! well!” he went on, subduing himself and prepared to listen. I wished the tassel had been any other colour than crimson, and hung fairer on the middle of his forehead; it seemed to fascinate me. And he, belike, forgot that I was there, for he thought, I knew, continually of his wife, and he would stop his feverish pacing on the floor, and hearken for a sound from the room where she was quartered with the maid. I made no answer.

“Well, well!” he cried again fiercely, turning upon me. “Out with it; out with the whole hellish transaction, man!”

And then I told him in detail what before my mother I had told in a brief abstract.

How that I had met young Borland coming down the breast of the brae at Kirkillstane last night and —

“Last night!” he cried. “Are ye havering? I saw ye go to your bed at ten, and your boots were in the kitchen.”

It was so, I confessed. I had gone to my room but not to bed, and had slipped out by the window when the house was still, with Uncle Andrew’s shoes.

“Oh, lad!” he cried, “it’s Andy’s shoes you stand in sure enough, for I have seen him twenty years syne in the plight that you are in this night. Merciful heaven! what dark blotch is in the history of this family of ours that it must ever be embroiled in crimes of passion and come continually to broken ends of fortune? I have lived stark honest and humble, fearing the Lord; the covenants have I kept, and still and on it seems I must beget a child of the Evil One!”

And how, going out thus under cover of night, I had meant to indulge a boyish fancy by seeing the light of Isobel Fortune’s window. And how, coming to the Kirkillstane, I met David Borland leaving the house, whistling cheerfully.

“Oh, Paul, Paul!” cried my father, “I mind of you an infant on her knees that’s ben there, and it might have been but yesterday your greeting in the night wakened me to mourn and ponder on your fate.” And how Borland, divining my object there, and himself new out triumphant from that cheerful house of many daughters, made his contempt for the Spoiled Horn too apparent.

“You walked to the trough-stane when you were a twelvemonth old,” said my father with the irrelevance of great grief, as if he recalled a dead son’s infancy.

And how, maddened by some irony of mine, he had struck a blow upon my chest, and so brought my challenge to something more serious and gentlemanly than a squalid brawl with fists upon the highway.

I stopped my story; it seemed useless to be telling it to one so much preoccupied with the thought of the woman he loved. His lips were open, his eyes were constant on the door.

But “Well! Well!” he cried again eagerly, and I resumed.

Of how I had come home, and crept into my guilty chamber and lay the long night through, torn by grief and anger, jealousy and distress. And how evading the others of the household as best I could that day, I had in the afternoon at the hour appointed gone out with Uncle Andrew’s pistol.

My father moaned – a waefu’ sound!

And found young Borland up on the moor before me with such another weapon, his face red byordinary, his hands and voice trembling with passion.

“Poor lad, poor lad!” my father cried blurting the sentiment as he had been a bairn.

How we tossed a coin to decide which should be the first to fire, and Borland had won the toss, and gone to the other end of our twenty paces with vulgar menaces and “Spoiled Horn” the sweetest of his epithets.

“Poor lad! he but tried to bluster down the inward voice that told him the folly o’t,” said father.

And how Borland had fired first. The air was damp. The sound was like a slamming door.

“The door of hope shut up for him, poor dear,” cried father.

And how he missed me in his trepidation that made his hand that held the pistol so tremble that I saw the muzzle quiver even at twenty paces.

“And then you shot him deliberately I M cried my father.

“No, no,” I cried at that, indignant. “I aimed without a glance along the barrel: the flint flashed; the prime missed fire, and I was not sorry, but Borland cried ‘Spoiled Horn’ braggingly, and I cocked again as fast as I could, and blindly jerked the trigger. I never thought of striking him. He fell with one loud cry among the rushes.”

“Murder, by God!” cried my father, and he relapsed into a chair, his body all convulsed with horror.