The Shoes of Fortune by Neil Munro
Produced by David Widger
THE SHOES OF FORTUNE
HOW THEY BROUGHT TO MANHOOD LOVE ADVENTURE AND CONTENT AS ALSO INTODIVERS PERILS ON LAND AND SEA IN FOREIGN PARTS AND IN AN ALIEN ARMY PAULGREIG OF THE HAZEL DEN IN SCOTLAND ONE TIME PURSER OF 'THE SEVEN SISTERS'BRIGANTINE OF HULL AND LATE LIEUTENANT IN THE REGIMENT D'AUVERGNE ALLAS WRIT BY HIM AND NOW FOR THE FIRST TIME SET FORTH
By Neil Munro
Illustrated by A. S. Boyd
THE SHOES OF FORTUNE
CHAPTER I
NARRATES HOW I CAME TO QUIT THE STUDY OF LATIN AND THE LIKE, AND TAKE TOHARD WORK IN A MOORLAND COUNTRY
It is an odd thing, chance--the one element to baffle the logician andmake the scheming of the wisest look as foolish in the long run as thesandy citadel a child builds upon the shore without any thought of theincoming tide. A strange thing, chance; and but for chance I might thisday be the sheriff of a shire, my head stuffed with the tangled phraseand sentiment of interlocutors, or maybe no more than an advocateoverlooked, sitting in John's Coffeehouse in Edinburgh--a moody souredman with a jug of claret, and cursing the inconsistencies of prefermentto office. I might have been that, or less, if it had not been for sotrifling a circumstance as the burning of an elderly woman's batch ofscones. Had Mistress Grant a more attentive eye to her Culross griddle,what time the scones for her lodgers, breakfast were a-baking fortyyears ago, I would never have fled furth my native land in a mortalterror of the gallows: had her griddle, say, been higher on theswee-chain by a link or two, Paul Greig would never have foregatheredwith Dan Risk, the blackguard skipper of a notorious craft; nor pinedin a foreign jail; nor connived, unwitting, at a prince's murder; normarched the weary leagues of France and fought there on a beggar'swage. And this is not all that hung that long-gone day upon a woman'sstair-head gossip to the neglect of her _cuisine_, for had this womanbeen more diligent at her baking I had probably never seen my Isobelwith a lover's eye.
Well, here's one who can rarely regret the past except that it is gone.It was hard, it was cruel often; dangers the most curious and unexpectedbeset me, and I got an insight to deep villainies whereof man may becapable; yet on my word, if I had the parcelling out of a second lifefor myself, I think I would have it not greatly differing from thefirst, that seems in God's providence like to end in the parish whereit started, among kent and friendly folk. I would not swear to it, yet Ifancy I would have Lucky Grant again gossiping on her stair-head andher scones burned black, that Mackellar, my fellow-lodger, might make meonce more, as he used to do, the instrument of his malcontent.
I mind, as it were yesterday, his gloomy look at the platter that morn'smorning. "Here they are again!" cried he, "fired to a cinder; it'salways that with the old wife, or else a heart of dough. For a bawbee Iwould throw them in her face."
"Well, not so much as that." said I, "though it is mighty provoking."
"I'm not thinking of myself," said he, always glooming at the platterwith his dark, wild Hielan' eye. "I'm not thinking of myself," said he,"but it's something by way of an insult to you, that had to complain ofSunday's haddocks."
"Oh, as to them," quo' I, "they did brawly for me; 'twas you put yourshare in your pocket and threw it away on the Green. Besides the sconesare not so bad as they look"--I broke one and ate; "they're owre good atleast for a hungry man like me to send back where they came from."
His face got red. "What's that rubbish about the haddocks and theGreen?" said he. "You left me at my breakfast when you went to the Ram'sHorn Kirk."
"And that's true, Jock," said I; "but I think I have made no' so bad aguess. You were feared to affront the landlady by leaving her ancientfish on the ashet, and you egged me on to do the grumbling."
"Well, it's as sure as death, Paul," said he shamefacedly, "I hate tovex a woman. And you're a thought wrong in your guess"--he laughed athis own humour as he said it--"for when you were gone to your kirk Itransferred my share of the stinking fish to your empty plate."
He jouked his head, but scarcely quick enough, for my Sallust caught himon the ear. He replied with a volume of Buchanan the historian, the manI like because he skelped the Lord's anointed, James the First, and fora time there was war in Lucky Grant's parlour room, till I threw himinto the recess bed snibbed the door, and went abroad into the streetleaving my room-fellow for once to utter his own complaints.
I went out with the itch of battle on me, and that was the consequenceof a woman's havering while scones burned, and likewise my undoing,for the High Street when I came to it was in the yeasty ferment ofencountering hosts, their cries calling poor foolish Paul Greig like atrumpet.
It had been a night and morning of snow, though I and Mackellar, so highin Lucky Grant's chamber in Crombie's Land, had not suspected it. Thedull drab streets, with their crazy, corbelled gable-ends, had beentransformed by a silent miracle of heaven into something new and clean;where noisome gutters were wont to brim with slops there was the napkinof the Lord.
For ordinary I hated this town of my banishment; hated its tun-belliedVirginian merchants, so constantly airing themselves upon the Tontinepiazza and seeming to suffer from prosperity as from a disease; and feltno great love of its women--always so much the madame to a drab-coatedlad from the moorlands; suffered from its greed and stifled with thestinks of it. "Gardyloo! Gardyloo! Gardyloo!" Faith! I hear that eveningslogan yet, and see the daunderers on the Rottenrow skurry like ratsinto the closes to escape the cascades from the attic windows. And whileI think I loved learning (when it was not too ill to come by), and wasdoing not so bad in my Humanities, the carven gateway of the collegein my two sessions of a scholar's fare never but scowled upon me as Ientered.
But the snow that morning made of the city a place wherein it was goodto be young, warm-clad, and hardy. It silenced the customary traffic ofthe street, it gave the morning bells a song of fairydom and the valleysof dream; up by-ordinary tall and clean-cut rose the crow-stepped walls,the chimney heads, and steeples, and I clean forgot my constant fancyfor the hill of Ballageich and the heather all about it. And war raged.The students faced 'prentice lads and the journeymen of the craftswith volleys of snowballs; the merchants in the little booths ranout tremulous and vainly cried the watch. Charge was made andcounter-charge; the air was thick with missiles, and close at handthe silver bells had their merry sweet chime high over the city of mybanishment drowned by the voices taunting and defiant.
Merry was that day, but doleful was the end of it, for in the fightI smote with a snowball one of the bailies of the burgh, who had comewaving his three-cocked hat with the pomp and confidence of an electedman and ordering an instant stoppage of our war: he made more ado aboutthe dignity of his office than the breakage of his spectacles, and I washaled before my masters, where I fear I was not so penitent as prudencewould advise.
Two days later my father came in upon Dawson's cart to convoy mehome. He saw the Principal, he saw the regents of the college, and up,somewhat clashed and melancholy, he climbed to my lodging. Mackellarfled before his face as it had been the face of the Medusa.
"Well, Paul," said my father, "it seems we made a mistake about yourbirthday."
"Did you?" said I, without meaning, for I knew he was ironical.
"It would seem so, at any rate," said he, not looking my airt at all,but sideways to the window and a tremor in his voice. "When your motherpacked your washing last Wednesday and slipped the siller I was notsupposed to see into a stocking-foot, she said, 'Now he's twenty and theworst of it over.' Poor woman! she was sadly out of her reckoning. I'mthinking I have here but a bairn of ten. You should still be at thedominie's."
"I was not altogether to blame, father," I cried. "The thing was anaccident."
"Of course, of course," said he soothin
He paid the landlady her lawing, with sixpence over for hermotherliness, whereat she was ready to greet, and he took an end of myblue kist down the stairs with me, and over with it like a common porterto the carrier's stance.
A raw, raining day, and the rough highways over the hoof with slush ofmelted snow, we were a chittering pair as we drove under the tilt of thecart that came to the Mearns to meet us, and it was a dumb and solemnhome-coming for me.
Not that I cared much myself, for my lawyership thus cracked in theshell, as it were I had been often seized with the notion that sixfeet of a moor-lander, in a lustre gown and a horse-hair wig and a blueshalloon bag for the fees, was a wastry of good material. But it wasthe dad and her at home I thought of, and could put my neck below thecartwheel for distressing. I knew what he thought of as he sat in thecart corner, for many a time he had told me his plans; and now they weresadly marred. I was to get as much as I could from the prelections ofProfessor Reid, work my way through the furrows of Van Eck, Van Muyden,and the Pandects, then go to Utrecht or Groningen for the final baking,and come back to the desk of Coghill and Sproat, Writers to the Signet,in Spreull's Land of Edinburgh; run errands between that dusty hole andthe taverns of Salamander Land, where old Sproat (that was my father'sdoer) held long sederunts with his clients, to write a thesis finally,and graduate at the art of making black look--not altogether whiteperhaps, but a kind of dirty grey. I had been even privileged to try asampling of the lawyer's life before I went to college, in the chambersof MacGibbon of Lanark town, where I spent a summer (that had been moreprofitably passed in my father's fields), backing letters, fair-copyingdrafts of lease and process, and indexing the letter-book. The last Ihated least of all, for I could have a half-sheet of foolscap betweenthe pages, and under MacGibbon's very nose try my hand at somethingsombre in the manner of the old ancient ballads of the Border. Doingthat same once, I gave a wild cry and up with my inky hand and shook it."Eh! eh!" cried MacGibbon, thinking I had gone mad. "What ails ye?" "Hestruck me with his sword!" said I like a fool, not altogether out of myfrenzy; and then the snuffy old body came round the corner of the desk,keeked into the letter-book where I should have been doing his work, andsaw that I was wasting good paper with clinking trash. "Oh, sirs! sirs!I never misused a minute of my youth in the like of that!" said he,sneering, and the sneer hurt. "No, I daresay not," I answered him."Perhaps ye never had the inclination--nor the art."
I have gone through the world bound always to say what was in me, andthat has been my sore loss more than once; but to speak thus to an oldman, who had done me no ill beyond demonstrating the general world'sattitude to poetry and men of sentiment, was the blackest insolence. Hewas well advised to send me home for a leathering at my father's hands.And I got the leathering, too, though it was three months after. I hadbeen off in the interim upon a sloop ship out of Ayr.
But here I am havering, and the tilted cart with my father and me in ittoiling on the mucky way through the Meams; and it has escaped coupinginto the Earn at the ford, and it has landed us at the gate of home; andin all that weary journey never a word, good or ill, from the man thatloved me and my mother before all else in a world he was well contentwith.
Mother was at the door; that daunted me.
"Ye must be fair starving, Paul," quoth she softly with her hand on myarm, and I daresay my face was blae with cold and chagrin. But my fatherwas not to let a disgrace well merited blow over just like that.
"Here's our little Paul, Katrine," said he, and me towering a head ortwo above the pair of them and a black down already on my face. "Here'sour little Paul. I hope you have not put by his bibs and daidlies, forthe wee man's not able to sup the good things of this life clean yet."
And that was the last word of reproof I heard for my folly from myfather Quentin Greig.