The Shoes of Fortune. Munro Neil
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.
CHAPTER V
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