THE husband, with an eye of warm alacrity and a welcome manner that
should have made his fortune in some livelier hostel than the dreary inn
of Flanders Moss, regarded the stranger with compassion. The wife, an
acrid peevish body, ill-content to be roused from bed at such an hour,
plucked at the strings of her night-cap, loosened and fastened them half
a dozen times as if they bridled a wroth that choked her, and looked with
candid disapproval on the customer standing in the kitchen with the rain
running from his wrap-rascal coat on the fresh-caumed flagstones of her
floor.
“H’m!” she coughed; “it’s no’ a time o’ the year when we’re lookin’ for
many visitors to the Flanders Moss.”
“But still-and-on ye’re welcome,” said the husband hastily, tender of the
stranger’s feelings. “I think there’s an egg or twa, Jennet, isna there?
And—and the hen; or—or yon ham?”
But Jennet tied her cap more tightly down upon her ears.
“I was making for the port o’ Menteith,” explained the stranger in a
breath, compassing the chamber and the characters before him at a gled’s
glance, feeling himself master of them both, flinging off the wrap-rascal
and throwing his bonnet on the hearth to dry. It struck the stone with a
sodden slap that would have made plain the kind of night from which he
had escaped, even if the ear had not more eloquently indicated that the
house was in the very throat of tempest.
“Ye’ll no hae pack nor powney?” said the dame sourly, with a pursed
mouth, surveying the young man’s hose, the clinging knee-breeches, the
stained red waistcoat, and the shabby green cutaway coat, but more intent
upon the dissipation of his shaven boyish countenance, the disorder of
his hair, and his reckless eye.
“Tut, tut! It’s no’ a nicht for a cadger’s dog, let alane a powney,”
said the amiable host; and then, in a beseeching tone that told the
nature of their partnery, “Am I richt or am I wrang, Jennet? At least
there maun be an egg or twa.”
The wife scowled at her mate, and said emphatically that eggs were out of
the question, and the hour was quite ridiculous.
“I’m no heedin’,” said the stranger; “I had a meal of a kind at Fintry.
What I want’s a bed.”
“Ye’ll get that!” cried the landlord heartily, glad to be assured of a
speedy return to his own blankets. “There’s a snug bed ben, and ye’ll
hae a’ the better appetite for breakfast.”
“But what’s your security?” demanded madam, and the goodman sighed.
Her customer shrugged his shoulders, threw himself in a chair, and thrust
his feet out to the fire of turf.
“God,” said he.
“Sir?” she queried.
“I said God was my security,” remarked the stranger.
“Ye couldna hae better!” cried the innkeeper, and drawing a chopin of ale
for the pious gentleman, beat down by the very gust of his geniality the
rising opposition of the woman’s manner.
Twenty minutes later Black Andy went to bed in the ben. He went with his
boots on, for he had, in the very act of stooping to unlace them by the
light of a tallow candle, seen that which led at the end to the rout of
any thought of sleep. The candle, which he had placed on the floor the
better to see his knots untied, threw a beam under a heavy oaken kist in
the corner, and glinted on a ring of brass that oddly hung from the
bottom of the box. He threw up the lid, to find no more than a pile of
homespun blanketing; then turned the kist quietly on its side, to learn
that the ring was on the latch of a secret bottom. He opened it: the
shallow space between the false bottom and the real one seemed at first
to hold no more than rags; but fumbling through them, he found a leather
pouch with three-and-twenty guineas—madam’s private hoard! As he counted
the money silently on the covering of the bed, the storm that held the
Flanders Moss in its possession seemed for the while to hold its breath,
as he did his own, so that he could hear the thud of his heart and each
reluctant tick of the kitchen clock.
For an hour he lay in darkness, wide awake, with the pouch in his breast.
The murmur of voices in the kitchen ceased, its light went out; the
lonely inn on the edge of the moor was black, and wholly lost in the
privacy of the night.
The innkeeper, easy man! turned his face to the box-bed wall in the
kitchen, and counted sheep going through a dip-tank till the fleece of
the last of them spread, and spread, and spread, like a magic
counterpane, and fell on him at last, smothering him to sleep. It was
his goodwife’s elbow. For she lay on her back, her hands hollowed behind
her ears, her cap-strings loose, and listened for some other sound than
the creak of the roof-cabars, the whistle of the thatch, and tempest’s
all-pervading symphony. Ah! it would have been an easier night for her
if she had had some chance to put her money elsewhere; it was her evil
star that had surely brought this man to Flanders Moss on a Hogmanay, the
very night when all honest bodies ought to be at their own fire-ends!
A sound in the room where he lay brought her sitting up in bed with every
sense alert. A sash squeaked: she shook her husband out of the fleece of
sleep, and they jumped together to the chamber door. It opened to a gale
that blew right through it from an open window: their lodger was gone!
“I kent it!” cried the woman furiously, and shrieked to realise, by a
feel of the hand in the dark, that her hoard had been discovered.
“Dod, now, that’s droll!” said her husband, scratching his head. “And
him had such good security!”