Читать книгу The Shoes of Fortune - Munro Neil - Страница 1

It is an odd thing, chance – the one element to baffle the logician and make the scheming of the wisest look as foolish in the long run as the sandy citadel a child builds upon the shore without any thought of the incoming tide. A strange thing, chance; and but for chance I might this day be the sheriff of a shire, my head stuffed with the tangled phrase and sentiment of interlocutors, or maybe no more than an advocate overlooked, sitting in John’s Coffeehouse in Edinburgh – a moody soured man with a jug of claret, and cursing the inconsistencies of preferment to office. I might have been that, or less, if it had not been for so trifling a circumstance as the burning of an elderly woman’s batch of scones. Had Mistress Grant a more attentive eye to her Culross griddle, what time the scones for her lodgers, breakfast were a-baking forty years ago, I would never have fled furth my native land in a mortal terror of the gallows: had her griddle, say, been higher on the swee-chain by a link or two, Paul Greig would never have foregathered with Dan Risk, the blackguard skipper of a notorious craft; nor pined in a foreign jail; nor connived, unwitting, at a prince’s murder; nor marched the weary leagues of France and fought there on a beggar’s wage. And this is not all that hung that long-gone day upon a woman’s stair-head gossip to the neglect of her cuisine, for had this woman been more diligent at her baking I had probably never seen my Isobel with a lover’s eye.

Well, here’s one who can rarely regret the past except that it is gone. It was hard, it was cruel often; dangers the most curious and unexpected beset me, and I got an insight to deep villainies whereof man may be capable; yet on my word, if I had the parcelling out of a second life for myself, I think I would have it not greatly differing from the first, that seems in God’s providence like to end in the parish where it started, among kent and friendly folk. I would not swear to it, yet I fancy I would have Lucky Grant again gossiping on her stair-head and her scones burned black, that Mackellar, my fellow-lodger, might make me once more, as he used to do, the instrument of his malcontent.

I mind, as it were yesterday, his gloomy look at the platter that morn’s morning. “Here they are again!” cried he, “fired to a cinder; it’s always that with the old wife, or else a heart of dough. For a bawbee I would throw them in her face.”

“Well, not so much as that.” said I, “though it is mighty provoking.”

“I’m not thinking of myself,” said he, always glooming at the platter with his dark, wild Hielan’ eye. “I’m not thinking of myself,” said he, “but it’s something by way of an insult to you, that had to complain of Sunday’s haddocks.”

“Oh, as to them,” quo’ I, “they did brawly for me; ‘twas you put your share in your pocket and threw it away on the Green. Besides the scones are not so bad as they look” – I broke one and ate; “they’re owre good at least for a hungry man like me to send back where they came from.”

His face got red. “What’s that rubbish about the haddocks and the Green?” said he. “You left me at my breakfast when you went to the Ram’s Horn Kirk.”

“And that’s true, Jock,” said I; “but I think I have made no’ so bad a guess. You were feared to affront the landlady by leaving her ancient fish on the ashet, and you egged me on to do the grumbling.”

“Well, it’s as sure as death, Paul,” said he shamefacedly, “I hate to vex a woman. And you’re a thought wrong in your guess” – he laughed at his own humour as he said it – “for when you were gone to your kirk I transferred my share of the stinking fish to your empty plate.”

He jouked his head, but scarcely quick enough, for my Sallust caught him on the ear. He replied with a volume of Buchanan the historian, the man I like because he skelped the Lord’s anointed, James the First, and for a time there was war in Lucky Grant’s parlour room, till I threw him into the recess bed snibbed the door, and went abroad into the street leaving my room-fellow for once to utter his own complaints.

I went out with the itch of battle on me, and that was the consequence of a woman’s havering while scones burned, and likewise my undoing, for the High Street when I came to it was in the yeasty ferment of encountering hosts, their cries calling poor foolish Paul Greig like a trumpet.

It had been a night and morning of snow, though I and Mackellar, so high in Lucky Grant’s chamber in Crombie’s Land, had not suspected it. The dull drab streets, with their crazy, corbelled gable-ends, had been transformed by a silent miracle of heaven into something new and clean; where noisome gutters were wont to brim with slops there was the napkin of the Lord.

For ordinary I hated this town of my banishment; hated its tun-bellied Virginian merchants, so constantly airing themselves upon the Tontine piazza and seeming to suffer from prosperity as from a disease; and felt no great love of its women – always so much the madame to a drab-coated lad from the moorlands; suffered from its greed and stifled with the stinks of it. “Gardyloo! Gardyloo! Gardyloo!” Faith! I hear that evening slogan yet, and see the daunderers on the Rottenrow skurry like rats into the closes to escape the cascades from the attic windows. And while I think I loved learning (when it was not too ill to come by), and was doing not so bad in my Humanities, the carven gateway of the college in my two sessions of a scholar’s fare never but scowled upon me as I entered.

But the snow that morning made of the city a place wherein it was good to be young, warm-clad, and hardy. It silenced the customary traffic of the street, it gave the morning bells a song of fairydom and the valleys of dream; up by-ordinary tall and clean-cut rose the crow-stepped walls, the chimney heads, and steeples, and I clean forgot my constant fancy for the hill of Ballageich and the heather all about it. And war raged. The students faced ‘prentice lads and the journeymen of the crafts with volleys of snowballs; the merchants in the little booths ran out tremulous and vainly cried the watch. Charge was made and counter-charge; the air was thick with missiles, and close at hand the silver bells had their merry sweet chime high over the city of my banishment drowned by the voices taunting and defiant.

Merry was that day, but doleful was the end of it, for in the fight I smote with a snowball one of the bailies of the burgh, who had come waving his three-cocked hat with the pomp and confidence of an elected man and ordering an instant stoppage of our war: he made more ado about the dignity of his office than the breakage of his spectacles, and I was haled before my masters, where I fear I was not so penitent as prudence would advise.

Two days later my father came in upon Dawson’s cart to convoy me home. He saw the Principal, he saw the regents of the college, and up, somewhat clashed and melancholy, he climbed to my lodging. Mackellar fled before his face as it had been the face of the Medusa.

“Well, Paul,” said my father, “it seems we made a mistake about your birthday.”

“Did you?” said I, without meaning, for I knew he was ironical.

“It would seem so, at any rate,” said he, not looking my airt at all, but sideways to the window and a tremor in his voice. “When your mother packed your washing last Wednesday and slipped the siller I was not supposed to see into a stocking-foot, she said, ‘Now he’s twenty and the worst of it over.’ Poor woman! she was sadly out of her reckoning. I’m thinking I have here but a bairn of ten. You should still be at the dominie’s.”

“I was not altogether to blame, father,” I cried. “The thing was an accident.”

“Of course, of course,” said he soothingly. “Was’t ever otherwise when the devil joggled an elbow? Whatever it was, accident or design, it’s a session lost. Pack up, Paul, my very young boy, and we’ll e’en make our way quietly from this place where they may ken us.”

He paid the landlady her lawing, with sixpence over for her motherliness, whereat she was ready to greet, and he took an end of my blue kist down the stairs with me, and over with it like a common porter to the carrier’s stance.

A raw, raining day, and the rough highways over the hoof with slush of melted snow, we were a chittering pair as we drove under the tilt of the cart that came to the Mearns to meet us, and it was a dumb and solemn home-coming for me.

Not that I cared much myself, for my lawyership thus cracked in the shell, as it were I had been often seized with the notion that six feet of a moor-lander, in a lustre gown and a horse-hair wig and a blue shalloon bag for the fees, was a wastry of good material. But it was the dad and her at home I thought of, and could put my neck below the cartwheel for distressing. I knew what he thought of as he sat in the cart corner, for many a time he had told me his plans; and now they were sadly marred. I was to get as much as I could from the prelections of Professor Reid, work my way through the furrows of Van Eck, Van Muyden, and the Pandects, then go to Utrecht or Groningen for the final baking, and come back to the desk of Coghill and Sproat, Writers to the Signet, in Spreull’s Land of Edinburgh; run errands between that dusty hole and the taverns of Salamander Land, where old Sproat (that was my father’s doer) held long sederunts with his clients, to write a thesis finally, and graduate at the art of making black look – not altogether white perhaps, but a kind of dirty grey. I had been even privileged to try a sampling of the lawyer’s life before I went to college, in the chambers of MacGibbon of Lanark town, where I spent a summer (that had been more profitably passed in my father’s fields), backing letters, fair-copying drafts of lease and process, and indexing the letter-book. The last I hated least of all, for I could have a half-sheet of foolscap between the pages, and under MacGibbon’s very nose try my hand at something sombre in the manner of the old ancient ballads of the Border. Doing that same once, I gave a wild cry and up with my inky hand and shook it. “Eh! eh!” cried MacGibbon, thinking I had gone mad. “What ails ye?” “He struck me with his sword!” said I like a fool, not altogether out of my frenzy; and then the snuffy old body came round the corner of the desk, keeked into the letter-book where I should have been doing his work, and saw that I was wasting good paper with clinking trash. “Oh, sirs! sirs! I never misused a minute of my youth in the like of that!” said he, sneering, and the sneer hurt. “No, I daresay not,” I answered him. “Perhaps ye never had the inclination – nor the art.”

I have gone through the world bound always to say what was in me, and that has been my sore loss more than once; but to speak thus to an old man, who had done me no ill beyond demonstrating the general world’s attitude to poetry and men of sentiment, was the blackest insolence. He was well advised to send me home for a leathering at my father’s hands. And I got the leathering, too, though it was three months after. I had been off in the interim upon a sloop ship out of Ayr.

But here I am havering, and the tilted cart with my father and me in it toiling on the mucky way through the Meams; and it has escaped couping into the Earn at the ford, and it has landed us at the gate of home; and in all that weary journey never a word, good or ill, from the man that loved me and my mother before all else in a world he was well content with.

Mother was at the door; that daunted me.

“Ye must be fair starving, Paul,” quoth she softly with her hand on my arm, and I daresay my face was blae with cold and chagrin. But my father was not to let a disgrace well merited blow over just like that.

“Here’s our little Paul, Katrine,” said he, and me towering a head or two above the pair of them and a black down already on my face. “Here’s our little Paul. I hope you have not put by his bibs and daidlies, for the wee man’s not able to sup the good things of this life clean yet.”

And that was the last word of reproof I heard for my folly from my father Quentin Greig.