IN DUNKERQUE--A LADY SPEAKS TO ME IN SCOTS AND A FAT PRIEST SEEMS TO
HAVE SOMETHING ON HIS MIND
Two days after, the _Roi Rouge_ came to Dunkerque; Horn the seaman went
home to Scotland in a vessel out of Leith with a letter in his pocket
for my people at Hazel Den, and I did my best for the next fortnight to
forget by day the remorse that was my nightmare. To this Captain Thurot
and Lord Clancarty, without guessing 'twas a homicide they favoured,
zealously helped me.
And then Dunkerque at the moment was sparkling with attractions.
Something was in its air to distract every waking hour, the pulse
of drums, the sound of trumpets calling along the shores, troops
manoeuvring, elation apparent in every countenance. I was Thurot's guest
in a lodging over a _boulangerie_ upon the sea front, and at daybreak I
would look out from the little window to see regiments of horse and foot
go by on their way to an enormous camp beside the old fort of Risebank.
Later in the morning I would see the soldiers toiling at the grand
sluice for deepening the harbour or repairing the basin, or on the dunes
near Graveline manoeuvring under the command of the Prince de Soubise
and Count St. Germain. All day the paving thundered with the roll of
tumbrels, with the noise of plunging horse; all night the front of
the _boulangerie_ was clamorous with carriages bearing cannon, timber,
fascines, gabions, and other military stores.
Thurot, with his ship in harbour, became a man of the town, with ruffled
neck- and wrist-bands, the most extravagant of waistcoats, hats laced
with point d'Espagne, and up and down Dunkerque he went with a restless
foot as if the conduct of the world depended on him. He sent an old
person, a reduced gentleman, to me to teach me French that I laboured
with as if my life depended on it from a desire to be as soon as
possible out of his reverence, for, to come to the point and be done
with it, he was my benefactor to the depth of my purse.
Sometimes Lord Clancarty asked me out to a _déjeuner_. He moved in a
society where I met many fellow countrymen--Captain Foley, of Rooth's
regiment; Lord Roscommon and his brother young Dillon; Lochgarry,
Lieutenant-Colonel of Ogilvie's Corps, among others, and by-and-by
I became known favourably in what, if it was not actually the select
society of Dunkerque, was so at least in the eyes of a very ignorant
young gentleman from the moors of Mearns.
It was so strange a thing as to be almost incredible, but my Uncle
Andy's shoes seemed to have some magic quality that brought them for
ever on tracks they had taken before, and if my cast of countenance did
not proclaim me a Greig wherever I went, the shoes did so. They were a
passport to the favour of folks the most divergent in social state--to
a poor Swiss who kept the door and attended on the table at Clancarty's
(my uncle, it appeared, had once saved his life), and to Soubise
himself, who counted my uncle the bravest man and the best mimic he had
ever met, and on that consideration alone pledged his influence to find
me a post.
You may be sure I did not wear such tell-tale shoes too often. I began
to have a freit about them as he had to whom they first belonged, and to
fancy them somehow bound up with my fortune.
I put them on only when curiosity prompted me to test what new
acquaintances they might make me, and one day I remember I donned them
for a party of blades at Lord Clancarty's, the very day indeed upon
which the poor Swiss, weeping, told me what he owed to the old rogue
with the scarred brow now lying dead in the divots of home.
There was a new addition to the company that afternoon--a priest who
passed with the name of Father Hamilton, though, as I learned later, he
was formerly Vliegh, a Fleming, born at Ostend, and had been educated
partly at the College Major of Louvain and partly in London. He was
or had been parish priest of Dixmunde near Ostend, and his most
decent memory of my uncle, whom he, too, knew, was a challenge to a
drinking-bout in which the thin man of Meams had been several bottles
more thirsty than the fat priest of Dixmunde.
He was corpulent beyond belief, with a dewlap like an ox; great limbs,
a Gargantuan appetite, and a laugh like thunder that at its loudest
created such convulsions of his being as compelled him to unbutton the
neck of his _soutane_, else he had died of a seizure.
His friends at Lord Clancarty's played upon him a little joke wherein I
took an unconscious part. It seemed they had told him Mr. Andrew Greig
was not really dead, but back in France and possessed of an elixir of
youth which could make the ancient and furrowed hills themselves look
like yesterday's creations.
“What! M. Andrew!” he had cried. “An elixir of grease were more in the
fellow's line; I have never seen a man's viands give so scurvy a return
for the attention he paid them. 'Tis a pole--this M. Andrew--but what a
head--what a head!”
“Oh! but 'tis true of the elixir,” they protested; “and he looks thirty
years younger; here he comes!”
It was then that I stepped in with the servant bawling my name, and the
priest surged to his feet with his face all quivering.
“What! M. Andrew!” he cried; “fattened and five-and-twenty. Holy Mother!
It is, then, that miracles are possible? I shall have a hogshead,
master, of thine infernal essence and drink away this paunch, and skip
anon like to the goats of--of-”
And then his friends burst into peals of laughter as much at my
bewilderment as at his credulity, and he saw that it was all a
pleasantry.
“Mon Dieu!” he said, sighing like a November forest. “There was never
more pestilent gleek played upon a wretched man. Oh! oh! oh! I had an
angelic dream for that moment of your entrance, for I saw me again a
stripling--a stripling--and the girl's name was--never mind. God rest
her! she is under grass in Louvain.”
All the rest of the day--at Clancarty's, at the Café de la Poste, in our
walk along the dunes where cannon were being fired at marks well out at
sea, this obese cleric scarcely let his eyes off me. He seemed to envy
and admire, and then again he would appear to muse upon my countenance,
debating with himself as one who stands at a shop window pondering a
purchase that may be on the verge of his means.
Captain Thurot observed his interest, and took an occasion to whisper to
me.
“Have a care, M. Greig,” said he playfully; “this priest schemes
something; that's ever the worst of your Jesuits, and you may swear 'tis
not your eternal salvation.”
'Twas that afternoon we went all together to the curious lodging in the
Rue de la Boucherie. I remember as it had been yesterday how sunny
was the weather, and how odd it seemed to me that there should be a
country-woman of my own there.
She was not, as it seems to me now, lovely, though where her features
failed of perfection it would beat me to disclose, but there was
something inexpressibly fascinating in her--in the mild, kind, melting
eyes, and the faint sad innuendo of her smile. She sat at a spinet
playing, and for the sake of this poor exile, sang some of the songs we
are acquainted with at home. Upon my word, the performance touched me
to the core! I felt sick for home: my mother's state, the girl at
Kirkillstane, the dead lad on the moor, sounds of Earn Water, clouds and
heather on the hill of Ballageich--those mingled matters swept through
my thoughts as I sat with these blithe gentlemen, hearkening to a simple
Doric tune, and my eyes filled irrestrainably with tears.
Miss Walkinshaw--for so her name was--saw what effect her music had
produced; reddened, ceased her playing, took me to the window while the
others discussed French poetry, and bade me tell her, as we looked out
upon the street, all about myself and of my home. She was, perhaps, ten
years my senior, and I ran on like a child.
“The Mearns!” said she. “Oh dear, oh dear! And you come frae the Meams!”
She dropped into her Scots that showed her heart was true, and told me
she had often had her May milk in my native parish.
“And you maybe know,” said she, flushing, “the toun of Glasgow, and the
house of Walkinshaw, my--my father, there?”
I knew the house very well, but no more of it than that it existed.
It was in her eyes the tears were now, talking of her native place, but
she quickly changed the topic ere I could learn much about her, and
she guessed--with a smile coming through her tears, like a sun through
mist--that I must have been in love and wandered in its fever, to be so
far from home at my age.
“There was a girl,” I said, my face hot, my heart rapping at the
recollection, and someway she knew all about Isobel Fortune in five
minutes, while the others in the room debated on so trivial a thing as
the songs of the troubadours.
“Isobel Fortune!” she said (and I never thought the name so beautiful
as it sounded on her lips, where it lingered like a sweet); “Isobel
Fortune; why, it's an omen, Master Greig, and it must be a good fortune.
I am wae for the poor lassie that her big foolish lad”--she smiled with
bewitching sympathy at me under long lashes--“should be so far away frae
her side. You must go back as quick as you can; but stay now, is it true
you love her still?”
The woman would get the feeling and the truth from a heart of stone; I
only sighed for answer.
“Then you'll go back,” said she briskly, “and it will be Earn-side again
and trysts at Ballageich--oh! the name is like a bagpipe air to me!--and
you will be happy, and be married and settle down--and--and poor Clemie
Walkinshaw will be friendless far away from her dear Scotland, but not
forgetting you and your wife.”
“I cannot go back there at all,” I said, with a long face, bitter
enough, you may be sure, at the knowledge I had thrown away all that she
depicted, and her countenance fell.
“What for no'?” she asked softly.
“Because I fought a duel with the man that Isobel preferred,
and--and--killed him!”
She shuddered with a little sucking in of air at her teeth and drew up
her shoulders as if chilled with cold.
“Ah, then,” said she, “the best thing's to forget. Are you a Jacobite,
Master Greig?”
She had set aside my love affair and taken to politics with no more than
a sigh of sympathy, whether for the victim of my jealousy, or Isobel
Fortune, or for me, I could not say.
“I'm neither one thing nor another,” said I. “My father is a staunch
enough royalist, and so, I daresay, I would be too if I had not got a
gliff of bonnie Prince Charlie at the Tontine of Glasgow ten years ago.”
“Ten years ago!” she repeated, staring abstracted out at the window.
“Ten years ago! So it was; I thought it was a lifetime since. And what
did you think of him?”
Whatever my answer might have been it never got the air, for here
Clancarty, who had had a message come to the door for him, joined us at
the window, and she turned to him with some phrase about the trampling
of troops that passed along the streets.
“Yes,” he said, “the affair marches quickly. Have you heard that England
has declared war? And our counter declaration is already on its way
across. _Pardieu!_ there shall be matters toward in a month or two and
the Fox will squeal. Braddock's affair in America has been the best
thing that has happened us in many years.”
Thus he went on with singular elation that did not escape me, though
my wits were also occupied by some curious calculations as to what
disturbed the minds of Hamilton and of the lady. I felt that I was in
the presence of some machinating influences probably at variance, for
while Clancarty and Roscommon and Thurot were elate, the priest made
only a pretence at it, and was looking all abstracted as if weightier
matters occupied his mind, his large fat hand, heavy-ringed, buttressing
his dewlap, and Miss Walkinshaw was stealing glances of inquiry at
him--glances of inquiry and also of distrust. All this I saw in a mirror
over the mantelpiece of the room.
“Sure there's but one thing to regret in it,” cried Clancarty suddenly,
stopping and turning to me, “it must mean that we lose Monsieur des
Souliers Rouges. _Peste!_ There is always something to worry one about a
war!”
“_Comment?_” said Thurot.
“The deportment,” answered his lordship. “Every English subject has
been ordered out of France. We are going to lose not only your company,
Father Hamilton, because of your confounded hare-brained scheme for
covering all Europe in a glass coach, but our M. Greig must put the
Sleeve between him and those best qualified to estimate and esteem his
thousand virtues of head and heart For a _louis_ or two I'd take ship
with him and fight on the other side. Gad! it would always be fighting
anyway, and one would be by one's friend.”
The priest's jaw fell as if my going was a blow to his inmost
affections; he turned his face rapidly into shadow; Miss Walkinshaw lost
no movement of his; she was watching him as he had been a snake.
“Oh! but it is not necessary that we lose my compatriot so fast as
that,” she said. “There are such things as permits, excepting English
friends of ours from deportment,--and--and--I fancy I could get one for
Mr. Greig.”
In my heart I thanked her for her ready comprehension of my inability to
go back to Britain with an easy mind; and I bowed my recognition of her
goodness.
She was paying no heed to my politeness; she had again an eye on the
priest, who was obviously cheered marvellously by the prospect.
And then we took a dish of tea with her, the lords and Thurot loudly
cheerful, Hamilton ruminant and thundering alternately, Miss Walkinshaw
showing a score of graces as hostess, myself stimulated to some unusual
warmth of spirit as I sat beside her, well-nigh fairly loving her
because she was my country-woman and felt so fond about my native
Mearns.