A SPOILED TRYST, AND OTHER THINGS THAT FOLLOWED ON THE OPENING OF THE
CHEST
The funeral was over before I cared to examine my bequest, and then I
went to it with some reluctance, for if a pair of shoes was the chief
contents of the brass-bound chest, there was like to be little else
except the melancholy relics of a botched life. It lay where he left it
on the night he came--under the foot of his bed--and when I lifted the
lid I felt as if I was spying upon a man through a keyhole. Yet, when I
came more minutely to examine the contents, I was disappointed that at
the first reflection nothing was there half so pregnant as his own most
casual tale to rouse in me the pleasant excitation of romance.
A bairn's caul--that sailor's trophy that has kept many a mariner
from drowning only that he might die a less pleasant death; a broken
handcuff, whose meaning I cared not to guess at; a pop or pistol; a
chap-book of country ballads, that possibly solaced his exile from
the land they were mostly written about; the batters of a Bible, with
nothing between them but his name in his mother's hand on the inside of
the board; a traveller's log or itinerary, covering a period of fifteen
years, extremely minute in its detail and well written; a broken
sixpence and the pair of shoes.
The broken sixpence moved my mother to tears, for she had had the other
half twenty years ago, before Andrew Greig grew ne'er-do-weel; the shoes
failed to rouse in her or in my father any interest whatever. If they
could have guessed it, they would have taken them there and then and
sunk them in the deepest linn of Earn.
There was little kenspeckle about them saving their colour, which was
a dull dark red. They were of the most excellent material, with a great
deal of fine sewing thrown away upon them in parts where it seems to
me their endurance was in no wise benefited, and an odd pair of silver
buckles gave at your second glance a foreign look to them.
I put them on at the first opportunity: they fitted me as if my feet had
been moulded to them, and I sat down to the study of the log-book. The
afternoon passed, the dusk came. I lit a candle, and at midnight, when I
reached the year of my uncle's escape from the Jesuits of Spain, I came
to myself gasping, to find the house in an alarm, and that lanthorns
were out about Earn Water looking for me, while all the time I was
_perdu_ in the dead uncle's chamber in the baron's wing, as we called
it, of Hazel Den House. I pretended I had fallen asleep; it was the
first and the last time I lied to my mother, and something told me she
knew I was deceiving her. She looked at the red shoes on my feet.
“Ugly brogues!” said she; “it's a wonder to me you would put them on
your feet. You don't know who has worn them.”
“They were Uncle Andy's,” said I, complacently looking at them, for they
fitted like a glove; the colour was hardly noticeable in the evening,
and the buckles were most becoming.
“Ay! and many a one before him, I'm sure,” said she, with distaste in
her tone, “I don't think them nice at all, Paul,” and she shuddered a
little.
“That's but a freit,” said I; “but it's not likely I'll wear much of
such a legacy.” I went up and left them in the chest, and took the diary
into my own room and read Uncle Andrew's marvellous adventures in the
trade of rover till it was broad daylight.
When I had come to the conclusion it seemed as if I had been in the
delirium of a fever, so tempestuous and unreal was that memoir of a wild
loose life. The sea was there, buffeting among the pages in rollers and
breakers; there were the chronicles of a hundred ports, with boozing
kens and raving lazarettos in them; far out isles and cays in nameless
oceans, and dozing lagoons below tropic skies; a great clash of weapons
and a bewildering deal of political intrigue in every part of the
Continent from Calais to Constantinople. My uncle's narrative in life
had not hinted at one half the marvel of his career, and I read his
pages with a rapture, as one hears a noble piece of music, fascinated to
the uttermost, and finding no moral at the end beyond that the world
we most of us live in with innocence and ignorance is a crust over
tremendous depths. And then I burned the book. It went up in a grey
smoke on the top of the fire that I had kept going all night for its
perusal; and the thing was no sooner done than I regretted it, though
the act was dictated by the seemly enough idea that its contents would
only distress my parents if they came to their knowledge.
For days--for weeks--for a season--I went about, my head humming with
Uncle Andy's voice recounting the most stirring of his adventures as
narrated in the log-book. I had been infected by almost his first words
the night he came to Hazel Den House, and made a magic chant of the mere
names of foreign peoples; now I was fevered indeed; and when I put on
the red shoes (as I did of an evening, impelled by some dandyism foreign
to my nature hitherto), they were like the seven-league boots for magic,
as they set my imagination into every harbour Uncle Andy had frequented
and made me a guest at every inn where he had met his boon companions.
I was wearing them the next time I went on my excursion to Earn side and
there met Isobel Fortune, who had kept away from the place since I had
smiled at my discovery of her tryst with Hervey's “Meditations.” She
came upon me unexpectedly, when the gentility of my shoes and the
recollection of all that they had borne of manliness was making me walk
along the road with a very high head and an unusually jaunty step.
She seemed struck as she came near, with her face displaying her
confusion, and it seemed to me she was a new woman altogether--at least,
not the Isobel I had been at school with and seen with an indifferent
eye grow up like myself from pinafores. It seemed suddenly scandalous
that the like of her should have any correspondence with so ill-suited a
lover as David Borland of the Dreipps.
For the first time (except for the unhappy introduction of Hervey's
“Meditations”) we stopped to speak to each other. She was the most
bewitching mixture of smiles and blushes, and stammering now and then,
and vastly eager to be pleasant to me, and thinks I, “My lass, you're
keen on trysting when it's with Borland.”
The very thought of the fellow in that connection made me angry in her
interest; and with a mischievous intention of spoiling his sport if he
hovered, as I fancied, in the neighbourhood, or at least of delaying his
happiness as long as I could, I kept the conversation going very blithe
indeed.
She had a laugh, low and brief, and above all sincere, which is the
great thing in laughter, that was more pleasant to hear than the sound
of Earn in its tinkling hollow among the ferns: it surprised me that she
should favour my studied and stupid jocosities with it so frequently.
Here was appreciation! I took, in twenty minutes, a better conceit of
myself, than the folks at home could have given me in the twelve
months since I left the college, and I'll swear to this date 'twas the
consciousness of my fancy shoes that put me in such good key.
She saw my glance to them at last complacently, and pretended herself to
notice them for the first time.
She smiled--little hollows came near the corners of her lips; of
a sudden I minded having once kissed Mistress Grant's niece in a
stair-head frolic in Glasgow High Street, and the experience had been
pleasant enough.
“They're very nice,” said Isobel.
“They're all that,” said I, gazing boldly at her dimples. She flushed
and drew in her lips.
“No, no!” I cried, “'twas not them I was thinking of; but their
neighbours. I never saw you had dimples before.”
At that she was redder than ever.
“I could not help that, Paul,” said she; “they have been always there,
and you are getting very audacious. I was thinking of your new shoes.”
“How do you know they're new?”
“I could tell,” said she, “by the sound of your footstep before you came
in sight.”
“It might not have been my footstep,” said I, and at that she was taken
back.
“That is true,” said she, hasty to correct herself. “I only thought it
might be your footstep, as you are often this way.”
“It might as readily have been David Borland's. I have seen him about
here.” I watched her as closely as I dared: had her face changed, I
would have felt it like a blow.
“Anyway, they're very nice, your new shoes,” said she, with a marvellous
composure that betrayed nothing.
“They were uncle's legacy,” I explained, “and had travelled far in many
ways about the world; far--and fast.”
“And still they don't seem to be in such a hurry as your old ones,” said
she, with a mischievous air. Then she hastened to cover what might seem
a rudeness. “Indeed, they're very handsome, Paul, and become you very
much, and--and--and--”
“They're called the Shoes of Sorrow; that's the name my uncle had for
them,” said I, to help her to her own relief.
“Indeed, and I hope it may be no more than a by-name,” she said gravely.
The day had the first rumour of spring: green shoots thrust among the
bare bushes on the river side, and the smell of new turned soil came
from a field where a plough had been feiring; above us the sky was blue,
in the north the land was pleasantly curved against silver clouds.
And one small bird began to pipe in a clump of willows, that showered a
dust of gold upon us when the little breeze came among the branches. I
looked at all and I looked at Isobel Fortune, so trim and bonny, and it
seemed there and then good to be a man and my fortunes all to try.
“Sorrow here or sorrow there, Isobel,” I said, “they are the shoes to
take me away sooner or later from Hazel Den.”
She caught my meaning with astounding quickness.
“Are you in earnest?” she asked soberly, and I thought she could not
have been more vexed had it been David Borland.
“Another year of this.” said I, looking at the vacant land, “would break
my heart.”
“Indeed, Paul, and I thought Earn-side was never so sweet as now,” said
she, vexed like, as if she was defending a companion.
“That is true, too,” said I, smiling into the very depths of her large
dark eyes, where I saw a pair of Spoiled Horns as plainly as if I looked
in sunny weather into Linn of Earn. “That is true, too. I have never
been better pleased with it than to-day. But what in the world's to
keep me? It's all bye with the college--at which I'm but middling well
pleased; it's all bye with the law--for which thanks to Heaven! and,
though they seem to think otherwise at Hazel Den House, I don't believe
I've the cut of a man to spend his life among rowting cattle and dour
clay land.”
“I daresay not; it's true,” said she stammeringly, with one fast glance
that saw me from the buckles of my red shoes to the underlids of my
eyes. For some reason or other she refused to look higher, and the
distant landscape seemed to have charmed her after that. She drummed
with a toe upon the path; she bit her nether lip; upon my word, the lass
had tears at her eyes! I had, plainly, kept her long enough from her
lover. “Well, it's a fine evening; I must be going,” said I stupidly,
making a show at parting, and an ugly sense of annoyance with David
Borland stirring in my heart. “But it will rain before morning,” said
she, making to go too, but always looking to the hump of Dungoyne that
bars the way to the Hielands. “I think, after all, Master Paul, I liked
the old shoon better than the new ones.”
“Do you say so?” I asked, astonished at the irrelevance that came
rapidly from her lips, as if she must cry it out or choke. “And how
comes that?”
“Just because--” said she, and never a word more, like a woman, nor fair
good-e'en nor fair good-day to ye, but off she went, and I was the stirk
again.
I looked after her till she went out of sight, wondering what had been
the cause of her tirravee. She fair ran at the last, as if eager to get
out of my sight; and when she disappeared over the brae that rose from
the river-side there was a sense of deprivation within me. I was clean
gone in love and over the lugs in it with Isobel Fortune.