Black Andy, with the pouch of guineas comforting the breast of him like
liquor, so that he hardly missed his wrap-rascal or his bonnet that were
drying by the kitchen fire, ran along the broken road for Kippen. It was
like the bed of a burn, and like a rested monster rose the storm afresh
from the Hieland hills. One glance he gave behind him at a step or two
from the window whence he burst; so dark was the night that the inn in
the womb of it was quite invisible. He looked over his shoulder for a
second time, having run for a little, and saw the bobbing of a lanthorn.
His amiable host was already on his track, and Kippen was plainly no
place for Black Andy.
With an oath he quitted the road, ran down through a clump of hazel, and
launched on the rushy moss that (as the story goes) had once been a part
of the sea that threshed on Stirling rock.
Like many another man, this scamp, unskilled in thievery, had no sooner
escaped the urgent danger of arrest than he rued his impulsive fall to
the temptation of a bag of clinking coins. He had drunk through an idle
youth, and others had paid the lawing; he had diced and cheated; he had
borrowed and left unpaid; he had sold bad cattle and denied his
warrandice; he had lived without labour—all of which is no more different
from theft than tipsyness is different from drunkenness. But hitherto he
had stopped on the verge of crime denominate, and it was his mother’s
only glad reflection when the thought of his follies haunted her pillow.
Had the temptation of the inn-wife’s gold come to him on another night,
and elsewhere, he could have turned the broad of his back on it, and
mustered conquering hosts of fear and of expedience to his support; the
misfortune was that it found him in a desperate hour. For a week he had
been in a most jovial company with some Campsie lairds; he had spent the
price of his father’s horse to the last plack royally, as if he had been
a bonnet-laird himself, and New Year’s Day should have seen him back at
Blaruisken with the price of the horse, or else it meant disaster. Even
that consideration scarcely would have made a thief of him (as he thought
now), but for the wife in the Moss of Flanders inn; she had so little
deserved to be the sole possessor of such gold. A comely wife, a civil
wife, a reasonably hospitable wife (as he argued with himself), might
have kept her money on the doorstep, and he would have been the last to
meddle with it; but this one deserved some punishment, and he was, in a
fashion, Heaven’s instrument. The husband—true, he was a kindly soul
(and here the instrument of Heaven found his sophistry weak a little at
the knees); but Black Andy had an intuition that the hoard was secret,
even from the husband, and he guessed aright the wife would never report
the actual nature of her loss.
He seemed the more contemptible a thief to himself, because in one
particular he had blundered like a fool. For yonder, beiking before the
innkeeper’s fire, were his wrap-rascal and his bonnet—the first, at
least, a clue to his identity. There was not another wrap-rascal than
his own in his native parish; the very name of the coat had seemed too
sinister for his mother, and the garment made him kenspeckle over half
the shire. Though the folk in the inn of the Flanders Moss might never
before have cast an eye on him, they had but to hang that garment on a
whin-bush at their door to learn his history from scores of passers-by.
Thinking thus—not any penitent in him, but the poltroon that is in all of
us at the thought of discovery by the world of what we really are—the
woman’s money coldly weighed upon his bosom like a divot. By God! a
rotten bargain had he made—to swap the easy mind of innocence for three
days’ drinking with numskull bonnet-lairds in a Campsie tavern.
But the thing was done, with no remedy; there was nothing for it but to
tramp home and meet his obligation to his father.
So busily did his mind engage with these considerations that the increase
of the tempest for a little never touched his comprehension. He came to
himself with a start at a stumble in a hag whose water almost reached his
knees, and realised that he was ignorant of the airt he moved to, and
that the passion of the night was like to shake the world in tatters.
The very moss below him seemed to quiver like a bog; no rush, no heather
shrub, but had its shrieking share in the cacophony of that unco hour
upon the curdled spaces of the ancient sea. Black Andy put out his
cold-starved hand before his face, and peered for it in vain; it might
have been a hand of ebony.
For hours he laboured through that windy desert, airting, as he judged by
the wind, for the north, as far away as possible from the inn of his
misdoing, and weariness seemed to turn his blood to spring-well water,
and his flesh to wool, so that the earthy cushion of the hags in which he
sometimes stumbled tempted him to lie and sleep. The last sheuch would
have done his business if he had not, sitting on its edge, beheld a
glimmer of light from a window. He dragged with an effort towards it,
climbed a dry-stone dyke, and felt with his hands along the back of some
dwelling which he took for a shepherd’s hut, until he came upon the door.
Breathlessly he leaned his shoulder to it and loudly rapped.
“First-foot!” he heard a voice exclaim, and remembered it was the New
Year’s Day as the bolt shot back and he fell in the arms—of the
innkeeper!
“Ye’re back, my man!” cried the innkeeper’s wife, with a face as white as
sleet. “It’ll be to pay your lodging?”
“Tut, tut! never mind the lawin’. It’s the New Year’s Day, and here’s
your dram,” said the genial landlord. “But, man, yon was a bonny prank
to play on us! We thought ye were awa’ wi’ the wife’s best blankets.”
“But a lodgin’s aye a lodgin’,” said the wife nervously; and Andy
laughed, knowing her perturbation.
“Here’s the lawin’,” he exclaimed, and banged her pouch of guineas in her
hand. “Ye’ll can count it later, and I’m awa’ to my bed again. Were ye
really feared I was gaein’ to cheat ye?”
It was the innkeeper who answered; his wife was off with her hoardings.
“Not me!” he said. “I kent ye had Grand Security.”