QUENTIN GREIG LOSES A SON, AND I SET OUT WITH A HORSE AS ALL MY FORTUNE
He pushed me from the chamber as I had been a stranger intruding, and I
went to the trance door and looked out at the stretching moorlands lit
by an enormous moon that rose over Cathkin Braes, and an immensity of
stars. For the first time in all my life I realised the heedlessness of
nature in human affairs the most momentous. For the moon swung up serene
beyond expression; the stars winked merrily: a late bird glid among the
bushes and perched momentarily on a bough of ash to pipe briefly almost
with the passion of the spring. But not the heedlessness of nature
influenced me so much as the barren prospect of the world that the moon
and stars revealed. There was no one out there in those deep spaces of
darkness I could claim as friend or familiar. Where was I to go? What
was I to do? Only the beginnings of schemes came to me--schemes
of concealment and disguise, of surrender even--but the last to be
dismissed as soon as it occurred to me, for how could I leave this house
the bitter bequest of a memory of the gallows-tree?
Only the beginnings, I say, for every scheme ran tilt against the
obvious truth that I was not only without affection or regard out there,
but without as much as a crown of money to purchase the semblance of
either.
I could not have stood very long there when my father came out, his face
like clay, and aged miraculously, and beckoned me to the parlour.
“Your mother--my wife,” said he, “is very ill, and I am sending for the
doctor. The horse is yoking. There is another woman in Driepps who--God
help her!--will be no better this night, but I wish in truth her case
was ours, and that it was you who lay among the heather.”
He began pacing up and down the floor, his eyes bent, his hands
continually wringing, his heart bursting, as it were, with sighs and the
dry sobs of the utmost wretchedness. As for me, I must have been clean
gyte (as the saying goes), for my attention was mostly taken up with the
tassel of his nightcap that bobbed grotesquely on his brow. I had not
seen it since, as a child, I used to share his room.
“What! what!” he cried at last piteously, “have ye never a word to say?
Are ye dumb?” He ran at me and caught me by the collar of the coat and
tried to shake me in an anger, but I felt it no more than I had been a
stone.
“What did ye do it for? What in heaven's name did ye quarrel on?”
“It was--it was about a girl,” I said, reddening even at that momentous
hour to speak of such a thing to him.
“A girl!” he repeated, tossing up his hands. “Keep us! Hoo lang are ye
oot o' daidlies? Well! well!” he went on, subduing himself and prepared
to listen. I wished the tassel had been any other colour than crimson,
and hung fairer on the middle of his forehead; it seemed to fascinate
me. And he, belike, forgot that I was there, for he thought, I knew,
continually of his wife, and he would stop his feverish pacing on the
floor, and hearken for a sound from the room where she was quartered
with the maid. I made no answer.
“Well, well!” he cried again fiercely, turning upon me. “Out with it;
out with the whole hellish transaction, man!”
And then I told him in detail what before my mother I had told in a
brief abstract.
How that I had met young Borland coming down the breast of the brae at
Kirkillstane last night and--
“Last night!” he cried. “Are ye havering? I saw ye go to your bed at
ten, and your boots were in the kitchen.”
It was so, I confessed. I had gone to my room but not to bed, and had
slipped out by the window when the house was still, with Uncle Andrew's
shoes.
“Oh, lad!” he cried, “it's Andy's shoes you stand in sure enough, for
I have seen him twenty years syne in the plight that you are in this
night. Merciful heaven! what dark blotch is in the history of this
family of ours that it must ever be embroiled in crimes of passion and
come continually to broken ends of fortune? I have lived stark honest
and humble, fearing the Lord; the covenants have I kept, and still and
on it seems I must beget a child of the Evil One!”
And how, going out thus under cover of night, I had meant to indulge a
boyish fancy by seeing the light of Isobel Fortune's window. And how,
coming to the Kirkillstane, I met David Borland leaving the house,
whistling cheerfully.
“Oh, Paul, Paul!” cried my father, “I mind of you an infant on her knees
that's ben there, and it might have been but yesterday your greeting in
the night wakened me to mourn and ponder on your fate.” And how Borland,
divining my object there, and himself new out triumphant from that
cheerful house of many daughters, made his contempt for the Spoiled Horn
too apparent.
“You walked to the trough-stane when you were a twelvemonth old,” said
my father with the irrelevance of great grief, as if he recalled a dead
son's infancy.
And how, maddened by some irony of mine, he had struck a blow upon
my chest, and so brought my challenge to something more serious and
gentlemanly than a squalid brawl with fists upon the highway.
I stopped my story; it seemed useless to be telling it to one so much
preoccupied with the thought of the woman he loved. His lips were open,
his eyes were constant on the door.
But “Well! Well!” he cried again eagerly, and I resumed.
Of how I had come home, and crept into my guilty chamber and lay the
long night through, torn by grief and anger, jealousy and distress. And
how evading the others of the household as best I could that day, I
had in the afternoon at the hour appointed gone out with Uncle Andrew's
pistol.
My father moaned--a waefu' sound!
And found young Borland up on the moor before me with such another
weapon, his face red byordinary, his hands and voice trembling with
passion.
“Poor lad, poor lad!” my father cried blurting the sentiment as he had
been a bairn.
How we tossed a coin to decide which should be the first to fire, and
Borland had won the toss, and gone to the other end of our twenty paces
with vulgar menaces and “Spoiled Horn” the sweetest of his epithets.
“Poor lad! he but tried to bluster down the inward voice that told him
the folly o't,” said father.
And how Borland had fired first. The air was damp. The sound was like a
slamming door.
“The door of hope shut up for him, poor dear,” cried father.
And how he missed me in his trepidation that made his hand that held the
pistol so tremble that I saw the muzzle quiver even at twenty paces.
“And then you shot him deliberately I M cried my father.
“No, no,” I cried at that, indignant. “I aimed without a glance along
the barrel: the flint flashed; the prime missed fire, and I was not
sorry, but Borland cried 'Spoiled Horn' braggingly, and I cocked again
as fast as I could, and blindly jerked the trigger. I never thought of
striking him. He fell with one loud cry among the rushes.”
“Murder, by God!” cried my father, and he relapsed into a chair, his
body all convulsed with horror.
I had told him all this as if I had been in a delirium, or as if it were
a tale out of a book, and it was only when I saw him writhing in his
chair and the tassel shaking over his eyes, I minded that the murderer
was me. I made for the door; up rose my father quickly and asked me what
I meant to do.
I confessed I neither knew nor cared.
“You must thole your assize,” said he, and just as he said it the
clatter of the mare's hoofs sounded on the causey of the yard, and he
must have minded suddenly for what object she was saddled there.
“No, no,” said he, “you must flee the country. What right have you to
make it any worse for her?”
“I have not a crown in my pocket,” said I.
“And I have less,” he answered quickly. “Where are you going? No, no,
don't tell me that; I'm not to know. There's the mare saddled, I meant
Sandy to send the doctor from the Mearns, but you can do that. Bid him
come here as fast as he can.”
“And must I come back with the mare?” I asked, reckless what he might
say to that, though my life depended on it.
“For the sake of your mother,” he answered, “I would rather never set
eyes on you or the beast again; she's the last transaction between us,
Paul Greig.” And then he burst in tears, with his arms about my neck.
[Illustration: 067]
Ten minutes later I was on the mare, and galloping, for all her ailing
leg, from Hazel Den as if it were my own loweing conscience. I roused
Dr. Clews at the Mearns, and gave him my father's message. “Man,” said
he, holding his chamber light up to my face, “man, ye're as gash as a
ghaist yersel'.”
“I may well be that,” said I, and off I set, with some of Uncle Andy's
old experience in my mind, upon a ride across broad Scotland.