I COME UPON THE RED SHOES
Uncle Andrew settled for the remainder of his time into our domestic
world at Hazel Den as if his place had been kept warm for him since ever
he went away. For the remainder of his time, I say, because he was to be
in the clods of Mearns kirkyard before the hips and haws were off the
hedges; and I think I someway saw his doom in his ghastly countenance
the first morning he sat at our breakfast table, contrite over his folly
of the night before, as you could see, but carrying off the situation
with worldly _sang froid_, and even showing signs of some affection for
my father.
His character may be put in two words--he was a lovable rogue; his
tipsy bitterness to the goodman his brother may be explained almost
as briefly: he had had a notion of Katrine Oliver, and had courted her
before ever she met my father, and he had lost her affection through
his own folly. Judging from what I would have felt myself in the like
circumstances, his bitterest punishment for a life ill spent must have
been to see Katrine Oliver's pitying kindness to him now, and the sight
of that douce and loving couple finding their happiness in each other
must have been a constant sermon to him upon repentance.
Yet, to tell the truth, I fear my Uncle Andrew was not constituted
for repentance or remorse. He had slain a man honestly once, and had
suffered the Plantations, but beyond that (and even that included, as
he must ever insist) he had been guilty of no mean act in all his roving
career. Follies--vices--extremes--ay, a thousand of them; but for most
his conscience never pricked him. On the contrary, he would narrate with
gusto the manifold jeopardies his own follies brought him into; his
wan face, nigh the colour of a shroud, would flush, and his eyes dance
humorously as he shocked the table when we sat at meals, our spoons
suspended in the agitation created by his wonderful histories.
Kept to a moderation with the bottle, and with the constant influence of
my mother, who used to feed the rogue on vegetables and, unknown to him,
load his broth with simples as a cure for his craving, Uncle Andrew was,
all things considered, an acquisition to Hazel Den House. Speaking for
myself, he brought the element of the unusual and the unexpected to a
place where routine had made me sick of my own society; and though
the man in his sober senses knew he was dying on his feet, he was the
cheeriest person of our company sequestered so remote in the moors. It
was a lesson in resignation to see yon merry eyes loweing like lamps
over his tombstone cheeks, and hear him crack a joke in the flushed and
heaving interludes of his cough.
It was to me he ever directed the most sensational of his extraordinary
memorials. My father did not like it; I saw it in his eye. It was
apparent to me that a remonstrance often hung on the tip of his tongue.
He would invent ridiculous and unnecessary tasks to keep me out of
reach of that alluring _raconteur_, and nobody saw it plainer than Uncle
Andrew, who but laughed with the mischievousness of a boy.
Well, the long and short of it was just what Quentin Greig feared--the
Spoiled Horn finally smit with a hunger for the road of the Greigs.
For three hundred years--we could go no further back, because of a bend
sinister--nine out of ten of that family had travelled that road, that
leads so often to a kistful of sailor's shells and a death with boots
on. It was a fate in the blood, like the black hair of us, the mole on
the temple, and the trick of irony. It was that ailment my father
had feared for me; it was that kept the household silent upon missing
brothers (they were dead, my uncle told me, in Trincomalee, and in
Jamaica, and a yard in the Borough of London); it was that inspired the
notion of a lawyer's life for Paul Greig.
Just when I was in the deepmost confidence of Uncle Andrew, who was by
then confined to his bed and suffering the treatment of Doctor Clews,
his stories stopped abruptly and he began to lament the wastry of his
life. If the thing had been better acted I might have been impressed,
for our follies never look just like what they are till we are finally
on the broad of our backs and the Fell Sergeant's step is at the door.
But it was not well acted; and when the wicked Uncle Andrew groaned over
the very ploys he had a week ago exulted in, I recognised some of my
mother's commonest sentiments in his sideways sermon. She had got her
quondam Andy, for lang syne's sake, to help her keep her son at home;
and he was doing his best, poor man, but a trifle late in the day.
“Uncle Andrew,” said I, never heeding his homily, “tell me what came of
the pock-marked tobacco planter when you and the negro lay in the swamp
for him?”
He groaned hopelessly.
“A rotten tale, Paul, my lad,” said he, never looking me in the face; “I
rue the day I was mixed up in that affair.”
“But it was a good story so far as it went, no further gone than
Wednesday last,” I protested.
He laughed at that, and for half an hour he put off the new man of
my mother's bidding, and we were on the old naughty footing again. He
concluded by bequeathing to me for the twentieth time the brass-bound
chest, and its contents that we had never seen nor could guess the
nature of. But now for the first time he let me know what I might expect
there.
“It's not what Quentin might consider much,” said he, “for there's not a
guelder of money in it, no, nor so little as a groat, for as the world's
divided ye can't have both the money and the dance, and I was aye the
fellow for the dance. There's scarcely anything in it, Paul, but the
trash--ahem!--that is the very fitting reward of a life like mine.”
“And still and on, uncle,” said I, “it is a very good tale about the
pock-marked man.”
“Ah! You're there, Greig!” cried the rogue, laughing till his hoast came
to nigh choke him. “Well, the kist's yours, anyway, such as it is; and
there's but one thing in it--to be strict, a pair--that I set any store
by as worth leaving to my nephew.”
“It ought to be spurs,” said I, “to drive me out of this lamentable
countryside and to where a fellow might be doing something worth while.”
“Eh!” he cried, “you're no' so far off it, for it's a pair of shoes.”
“A pair of shoes!” I repeated, half inclined to think that Uncle Andrew
was doited at last.
“A pair of shoes, and perhaps in some need of the cobbler, for I have
worn them a good deal since I got them in Madras. They were not new when
I got them, but by the look of them they're not a day older now. They
have got me out of some unco' plights in different parts of the world,
for all that the man who sold them to me at a bonny penny called them
the Shoes of Sorrow; and so far as I ken, the virtue's in them yet.”
“A doomed man's whim,” thought I, and professed myself vastly gratified
by his gift.
He died next morning. It was Candlemas Day. He went out at last like a
crusie wanting oil. In the morning he had sat up in bed to sup
porridge that, following a practice I had made before his reminiscences
concluded, I had taken in to him myself. Tremendous long and lean the
upper part of him looked, and the cicatrice upon his brow made his
ghastliness the more appalling. When he sat against the bolsters he
could see through the window into the holm field, and, as it happened,
what was there but a wild young roe-deer driven down from some higher
part of the country by stress of winter weather, and a couple of mongrel
dogs keeping him at bay in an angle of the fail dyke.
I have seldom seen a man more vastly moved than Uncle Andrew looking
upon this tragedy of the wilds. He gasped as though his chest would
crack, a sweat burst on his face.
“That's--that's the end o't, Paul, my lad!” said he. “Yonder's your
roving uncle, and the tykes have got him cornered at last. No more the
heather and the brae; no more--no more--no more--”
Such a change came on him that I ran and cried my mother ben, and she
and father were soon at his bedside.
It was to her he turned his eyes, that had seen so much of the spacious
world of men and women and all their multifarious interests, great and
little. They shone with a light of memory and affection, so that I got
there and then a glimpse of the Uncle Andrew of innocence and the Uncle
Andrew who might have been if fate had had it otherwise.
He put out his hand and took hers, and said goodbye.
“The hounds have me, Katrine,” said he. “I'm at the fail dyke corner.”
“I'll go out and whistle them off, uncle,” said I, fancying it all a
doited man's illusion, though the look of death was on him; but I stood
rebuked in the frank gaze he gave me of a fuller comprehension than
mine, though he answered me not.
And then he took my father's hand in his other, and to him too he said
farewell.
“You're there, Quentin!” said he; “and Katrine--Katrine--Katrine chose
by far the better man. God be merciful to poor Andy Greig, a sinner.”
And these were his last words.