The Shoes of Fortune. Munro Neil

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      CHAPTER VI

      MY DEED ON THE MOOR OF MEARNS

      Next day I shot David Borland of the Driepps.

      It was the seventh of March, the first day I heard the laverock that season, and it sang like to burst its heart above the spot where the lad fell with a cry among the rushes. It rose from somewhere in our neighbourhood, aspiring to the heavens, but chained to earth by its own song; and even yet I can recall the eerie influence of that strange conjunction of sin and song as I stood knee-deep in the tangle of the moor with the pistol smoking in my hand.

      To go up to the victim of my jealousy as he lay ungainly on the ground, his writhing over, was an ordeal I could not face.

      “Davie, Davie!” I cried to him over the thirty paces; but I got no reply from yon among the rushes. I tried to wet my cracking lips with a tongue like a cork, and “Davie, oh, Davie, are ye badly hurt?” I cried, in a voice I must have borrowed from ancient time when my forefathers fought with the forest terrors.

      I listened and I better listened, but Borland still lay there at last, a thing insensate like a gangrel’s pack, and in all the dreary land there was nothing living but the laverock and me.

      The bird was high – a spot upon the blue; his song, I am sure, was the song of his kind, that has charmed lovers in summer fields from old time – a melody rapturous, a message like the message of the evening star that God no more fondly loves than that small warbler in desert places – and yet there and then it deaved me like a cry from hell. No heavenly message had the lark for me: he flew aloft there into the invisible, to tell of this deed of mine among the rushes. Not God alone would hear him tell his story: they might hear it, I knew, in shepherds’ cots; they might hear it in an old house bowered dark among trees; the solitary witness of my crime might spread the hue and cry about the shire; already the law might be on the road for young Paul Greig.

      I seemed to listen a thousand years to that telltale in the air; for a thousand years I scanned the blue for him in vain, yet when I looked at my pistol again the barrel was still warm.

      It was the first time I had handled such a weapon.

      A senseless tool it seemed, and yet the crooking of a finger made it the confederate of hate; though it, with its duty done, relapsed into a heedless silence, I, that owned it for my instrument, must be wailing in my breast, torn head to foot with thunders of remorse.

      I raised the hammer, ran a thumb along the flint, seeing something fiendish in the jaws that held it; I lifted up the prime-cap, and it seemed some miracle of Satan that the dust I had put there in the peace of my room that morning in Hazel Den should have disappeared. “Truefitt” on the lock; a silver shield and an initial graven on it; a butt with a dragon’s grin that had seemed ridiculous before, and now seemed to cry “Cain!” Lord! that an instrument like this in an unpractised hand should cut off all young Borland’s earthly task, end his toil with plough and harrow, his laugh and story.

      I looked again at the shapeless thing at thirty paces. “It cannot be,” I told myself; and I cried again, in the Scots that must make him cease his joke, “I ken ye’re only lettin’ on, Davie. Get up oot o’ that and we’ll cry quits.”

      But there was no movement; there was no sound; the tell-tale had the heavens to himself.

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