The Shoes of Fortune

And then the brute, with his hands thrust to the depth of his pockets, staggered me as if he had done it with a blow of his fist.

“No,” said he, with a very cunning tone, “ye’re no linen-draper perhaps, but – ye’re maybe no sae decent a man, young Greig.”

It was impossible for me to conceal even from this tipsy rogue my astonishment and alarm at this. It seemed to me the devil himself must be leagued against me in the cause of justice. A cold sweat came on my face and the palms of my hands. I opened my mouth and meant to give him the lie but I found I dare not do so in the presence of what seemed a miracle of heaven.

“How do you ken my name’s Greig?” I asked at the last.

“Fine that,” he made answer, with a grin; “and there’s mony an odd thing else I ken.”

“Well, it’s no matter,” said I, preparing to quit him, but in great fear of what the upshot might be; “I’m for off, anyway.”

By this time it was obvious that he was not so drunk as I thought him at first, and that in temper and tact he was my match even with the glass in him. “Do ye ken what I would be doing if I was you?” said he seemingly determined not to let me depart like that, for he took a step or two after me.

I made no reply, but quickened my pace and after me he came, lurching and catching at my arm; and I mind to this day the roll of him gave me the impression of a crab.

“If it’s money ye want-” I said at the end of my patience.

“Curse your money!” he cried, pretending to spit the insult from his mouth. “Curse your money; but if I was you, and a weel-kent skipper like Dan Risk – like Dan Risk of the Seven Sisters– made up to me out of a redeeculous good nature and nothing else, I would gladly go and splice the rope with him in the nearest ken.”

“Go and drink with yourself, man,” I cried; “there’s the money for a chappin of ate, and I’ll forego my share of it.”

I could have done nothing better calculated to infuriate him. As I held out the coin on the palm of my hand he struck it up with an oath and it rolled into the syver. His face flamed till the neck of him seemed a round of seasoned beef.

“By the Rock o’ Bass!” he roared, “I would clap ye in jyle for less than your lousy groat.”

Ah, then, it was in vain I had put the breadth of Scotland between me and that corpse among the rushes: my heart struggled a moment, and sank as if it had been drowned in bilge. I turned on the man what must have been a gallows face, and he laughed, and, gaining his drunken good nature again he hooked me by the arm, and before my senses were my own again he was leading me down the street and to the harbour. I had never a word to say.

The port, as I tell, was swathed in the haar of the east, out of which tall masts rose dim like phantom spears; the clumsy tarred bulwarks loomed like walls along the quay, and the neighbourhood was noisy with voices that seemed unnatural coming out of the haze. Mariners were hanging about the sheds, and a low tavern belched others out to keep them company. Risk made for the tavern, and at that I baulked.

“Oh, come on!” said he. “If I’m no’ mistaken Dan Risk’s the very man ye’re in the need of. You’re wanting out of Scotland, are ye no’?”

“More than that; I’m wanting out of myself,” said I, but that seemed beyond him.

“Come in anyway, and we’ll talk it over.”

That he might help me out of the country seemed possible if he was not, as I feared at first, some agent of the law and merely playing with me, so I entered the tavern with him.

“Two gills to the coffin-room, Mrs. Clerihew,” he cried to the woman in the kitchen. “And slippy aboot it, if ye please, for my mate here’s been drinking buttermilk all his life, and ye can tell’t in his face.”

“I would rather have some meat,” said I.

“Humph!” quo’ he, looking at my breeches. “A lang ride!” He ordered the food at my mentioning, and made no fuss about drinking my share of the spirits as well as his own, while I ate with a hunger that was soon appeased, for my eye, as the saying goes, was iller to satisfy than my appetite.

He sat on the other side of the table in the little room that doubtless fairly deserved the name it got of coffin, for many a man, I’m thinking, was buried there in his evil habits; and I wondered what was to be next.

“To come to the bit,” said the at last, looking hard into the bottom of his tankard in a way that was a plain invitation to buy more for him. “To come to the bit, you’re wanting out of the country?”

“It’s true,” said I; “but how do you know? And how do you know my name, for I never saw you to my knowledge in all my life before?”

“So much the worse for you; I’m rale weel liked by them that kens me. What would ye give for a passage to Nova Scotia?”

“It’s a long way,” said I, beginning to see a little clearer.

“Ay,” said he, “but I’ve seen a gey lang rope too, and a man danglin’ at the end of it.”

Again my face betrayed me. I made no answer.

“I ken all aboot it,” he went on. “Your name’s Greig; ye’re from a place called the Hazel Den at the other side o’ the country; ye’ve been sailing wi’ a stiff breeze on the quarter all night, and the clime o’ auld Scotland’s one that doesna suit your health, eh? What’s the amount?” said he, and he looked towards my pocket “Could we no’ mak’ it halfers?”

“Five pounds,” said I, and at that he looked strangely dashed.

“Five pounds,” he repeated incredulously. “It seems to have been hardly worth the while.” And then his face changed, as if a new thought had struck him. He leaned over the table and whispered with the infernal tone of a confederate, “Doused his glim, eh?” winking with his hale eye, so that I could not but shiver at him, as at the touch of slime.

“I don’t understand,” said I.

“Do ye no’?” said he, with a sneer; “for a Greig ye’re mighty slow in the uptak’. The plain English o’ that, then, is that ye’ve killed a man. A trifle like that ance happened to a Greig afore.”

“What’s your name?” I demanded.

“Am I no tellin’ ye?” said he shortly. “It’s just Daniel Risk; and where could you get a better? Perhaps ye were thinkin’ aboot swappin’ names wi’ me; and by the Bass, it’s Dan’s family name would suit very weel your present position,” and the scoundrel laughed at his own humour.

“I asked because I was frightened it might be Mahoun,” said I. “It seems gey hard to have ridden through mire for a night and a day, and land where ye started from at the beginning. And how do ye ken all that?”

“Oh!” he said, “kennin’s my trade, if ye want to know. And whatever way I ken, ye needna think I’m the fellow to make much of a sang aboot it. Still and on, the thing’s frowned doon on in this country, though in places I’ve been it would be coonted to your credit. I’ll take anither gill; and if ye ask me, I would drench the butter-milk wi’ something o’ the same, for the look o’ ye sittin’ there’s enough to gie me the waterbrash. Mrs. Clerihew – here!” He rapped loudly on the table, and the drink coming in I was compelled again to see him soak himself at my expense. He reverted to my passage from the country, and “Five pounds is little enough for it,” said he; “but ye might be eking it oot by partly working your passage.”

“I didn’t say I was going either to Nova Scotia or with you,” said I, “and I think I could make a better bargain elsewhere.”

“So could I, maybe,” said he, fuming of spirits till I felt sick. “And it’s time I was doin’ something for the good of my country.” With that he rose to his feet with a look of great moral resolution, and made as if for the door, but by this time I understood him better.

“Sit down, ye muckle hash!” said I, and I stood over him with a most threatening aspect.

“By the Lord!” said he, “that’s a Greig anyway!”

“Ay!” said I. “ye seem to ken the breed. Can I get another vessel abroad besides yours?”

“Ye can not,” said he, with a promptness I expected, “unless ye wait on the Sea Pyat. She leaves for Jamaica next Thursday; and there’s no’ a spark of the Christian in the skipper o’ her, one Macallum from Greenock.”

For the space of ten minutes I pondered over the situation. Undoubtedly I was in a hole. This brute had me in his power so long as my feet were on Scottish land, and he knew it. At sea he might have me in his power too, but against that there was one precaution I could take, and I made up my mind.

“I’ll give you four pounds – half at leaving the quay and the other half when ye land me.”

“My conscience wadna’ aloo me,” protested the rogue; but the greed was in his face, and at last he struck my thumb on the bargain, and when he did that I think I felt as much remorse at the transaction as at the crime from whose punishment I fled.

“Now,” said I, “tell me how you knew me and heard about – about – ”

“About what?” said he, with an affected surprise. “Let me tell ye this, Mr. Greig, or whatever your name may be, that Dan Risk is too much of the gentleman to have any recollection of any unpleasantness ye may mention, now that he has made the bargain wi’ ye. I ken naethin’ aboot ye, if ye please: whether your name’s Greig or Mackay or Habbie Henderson, it’s new to me, only ye’re a likely lad for a purser’s berth in the Seven Sisters.” And refusing to say another word on the topic that so interested me, he took me down to the ship’s side, where I found the Seven Sisters was a brigantine out of Hull, sadly in the want of tar upon her timbers and her mainmast so decayed and worm-eaten that it sounded boss when I struck it with my knuckles in the by-going.

Risk saw me doing it. He gave an ugly smile.

“What do ye think o’ her? said he, showing me down the companion.

“Mighty little,” I told him straight. “I’m from the moors,” said I, “but I’ve had my feet on a sloop of Ayr before now; and by the look of this craft I would say she has been beeking in the sun idle till she rotted down to the garboard strake.”

He gave his gleed eye a turn and vented some appalling oaths, and wound up with the insult I might expect – namely, that drowning was not my portion.

“There was some brag a little ago of your being a gentleman,” said I, convinced that this blackguard was to be treated to his own fare if he was to be got on with at all. “There’s not much of a gentleman in the like of that.”

At this he was taken aback. “Well,” said he, “don’t you cross my temper; if my temper’s crossed it’s gey hard to keep up gentility. The ship’s sound enough, or she wouldn’t be half a dizen times round the Horn and as weel kent in Halifax as one o’ their ain dories. She’s guid enough for your – for our business, if ye please, Mr. Greig; and here’s my mate Murchison.”

Another tarry-breeks of no more attractive aspect came down the companion.

“Here’s a new hand for ye,” said the skipper humorously.

The mate looked me up and down with some contempt from his own height of little more than five feet four, and peeled an oilskin coat off him. I was clad myself in a good green coat and breeches with fine wool rig-and-fur hose, and the buckled red shoon and the cock of my hat I daresay gave me the look of some importance in tarry-breeks’ eyes. At any rate, he did not take Risk’s word for my identity, but at last touched his hat with awkward fingers after relinquishing his look of contempt.

“Mr. Jamieson?” said he questioningly, and the skipper by this time was searching in a locker for a bottle of rum he said he had there for the signing of agreements. “Mr. Jamieson,” said the mate, “I’m glad to see ye. The money’s no; enough for the job, and that’s letting ye know. It’s all right for Dan here wi’ neither wife nor family, but – ”

“What’s that, ye idiot?” cried Risk turning about in alarm. “Do ye tak’ this callan for the owner? I tell’t ye he was a new hand.”

“A hand!” repeated Murchison, aback and dubious.

“Jist that; he’s the purser.”

Murchison laughed. “That’s a new ornament on the auld randy; he’ll be to keep his keekers on the manifest, like?” said he as one who cracks a good joke. But still and on he scanned me with a suspicious eye, and it was not till Risk had taken him aside later in the day and seemingly explained, that he was ready to meet me with equanimity. By that time I had paid the skipper his two guineas, for the last of his crew was on board, every man Jack of them as full as the Baltic, and staggering at the coamings of the hatches not yet down, until I thought half of them would finally land in the hold.

CHAPTER IX

WHEREIN THE “SEVEN SISTERS” ACTS STRANGELY, AND I SIT WAITING FOR THE MANACLES

An air of westerly wind had risen after meridian and the haar was gone, so that when I stood at the break of the poop as the brigantine crept into the channel and flung out billows of canvas while her drunken seamen quarrelled and bawled high on the spars, I saw, as I imagined, the last of Scotland in a pleasant evening glow. My heart sank. It was not a departure like this I had many a time anticipated when I listened to Uncle Andys tales; here was I with blood on my hands and a guinea to start my life in a foreign country; that was not the worst of it either, for far more distress was in my mind at the reflection that I travelled with a man who was in my secret. At first I was afraid to go near him once our ropes were off the pawls, and I, as it were, was altogether his, but to my surprise there could be no pleasanter man than Risk when he had the wash of water under his rotten barque. He was not only a better-mannered man to myself, but he became, in half an hour of the Firth breeze, as sober as a judge. But for the roving gleed eye, and what I had seen of him on shore, Captain Dan Risk might have passed for a model of all the virtues. He called me Mr. Greig and once or twice (but I stopped that) Young Hazel Den, with no irony in the appellation, and he was at pains to make his mate see that I was one to be treated with some respect, proffering me at our first meal together (for I was to eat in the cuddy,) the first of everything on the table, and even making some excuses for the roughness of the viands. And I could see that whatever his qualities of heart might be, he was a good seaman, a thing to be told in ten minutes by a skipper’s step on a deck and his grip of the rail, and his word of command. Those drunken barnacles of his seemed to be men with the stuff of manly deeds in them, when at his word they dashed aloft among the canvas canopy to fist the bulging sail and haul on clew or gasket, or when they clung on greasy ropes and at a gesture of his hand heaved cheerily with that “yo-ho” that is the chant of all the oceans where keels run.

Murchison was a saturnine, silent man, from whom little was to be got of edification. The crew numbered eight men, one of them a black deaf mute, with the name of Antonio Ferdinando, who cooked in a galley little larger than the Hazel Den kennel. It was apparent that no two of them had ever met before, such a career of flux and change is the seaman’s, and except one of them, a fellow Horn, who was foremast man, a more villainous gang I never set eyes on before or since. If Risk had raked the ports of Scotland with a fine bone comb for vermin, he could not have brought together a more unpleasant-looking crew. No more than two of them brought a bag on board, and so ragged was their appearance that I felt ashamed to air my own good clothes on the same deck with them.

Fortunately it seemed I had nothing to do with them nor they with me; all that was ordered for the eking out of my passage, as Risk had said, was to copy the manifest, and I had no sooner set to that than I discerned it was a gowk’s job just given me to keep me in employ in the cabin. Whatever his reason, the man did not want me about his deck. I saw that in an interlude in my writing, when I came up from his airless den to learn what progress old rotten-beams made under all her canvas.

It had declined to a mere handful of wind, and the vessel scarcely moved, seemed indeed steadfast among the sea-birds that swooped and wheeled and cried around her. I saw the sun just drop among blood-red clouds over Stirling, and on the shore of Fife its pleasant glow. The sea swung flat and oily, running to its ebb, and lapping discernibly upon a recluse promontory of land with a stronghold on it.

“What do you call yon, Horn?” I said to the seaman I have before mentioned, who leaned upon the taffrail and watched the vessel’s greasy wake, and I pointed to the gloomy buildings on the shore.

“Blackness Castle,” said he, and he had time to tell no more, for the skipper bawled upon him for a shirking dog, and ordered the flemishing of some ropes loose upon the forward deck. Nor was I exempt from his zeal for the industry of other folks for he came up to me with a suspicious look, as if he feared I had been hearing news from his foremast man, and “How goes the manifest, Mr. Greig?” says he.

“Oh, brawly, brawly!” said I, determined to begin with Captain Daniel Risk as I meant to end.

He grew purple, but restrained himself with an effort. “This is not an Ayr sloop, Mr. Greig,” said he; “and when orders go on the Seven Sisters I like to see them implemented. You must understand that there’s a pressing need for your clerking, or I would not be so soon putting you at it.”

“At this rate of sailing,” says I, “I’ll have time to copy some hundred manifests between here and Nova Scotia.”

“Perhaps you’ll permit me to be the best judge of that,” he replied in the English he ever assumed with his dignity, and seeing there was no more for it, I went back to my quill.

It was little wonder, in all the circumstances, that I fell asleep over my task with my head upon the cabin table whereon I wrote, and it was still early in the night when I crawled into the narrow bunk that the skipper had earlier indicated as mine.

Weariness mastered my body, but my mind still roamed; the bunk became a coffin quicklimed, and the murderer of David Borland lying in it; the laverock cried across Earn Water and the moors of Renfrew with the voice of Daniel Risk. And yet the strange thing was that I knew I slept and dreamed, and more than once I made effort, and dragged myself into wakefulness from the horrors of my nightmare. At these times there was nothing to hear but the plop of little waves against the side of the ship, a tread on deck, and the call of the watch.

I had fallen into a sleep more profound than any that had yet blessed my hard couch, when I was suddenly wakened by a busy clatter on the deck, the shriek of ill-greased davits, the squeak of blocks, and the fall of a small-boat into the water. Another odd sound puzzled me: but for the probability that we were out over Bass I could have sworn it was the murmur of a stream running upon a gravelled shore. A stream – heavens! There could be no doubt about it now; we were somewhere close in shore, and the Seven Sisters was lying to. The brigantine stopped in her voyage where no stoppage should be; a small boat plying to land in the middle of the night; come! here was something out of the ordinary, surely, on a vessel seaward bound. I had dreamt of the gallows and of Dan Risk as an informer. Was it a wonder that there should flash into my mind the conviction of my betrayal? What was more likely than that the skipper, secure of my brace of guineas, was selling me to the garrison of Blackness?

I clad myself hurriedly and crept cautiously up the companion ladder, and found myself in overwhelming darkness, only made the more appalling and strange because the vessel’s lights were all extinguished. Silence large and brooding lay upon the Seven Sisters as she lay in that obscuring haar that had fallen again; she might be Charon’s craft pausing mid-way on the cursed stream, and waiting for the ferry cry upon the shore of Time. We were still in the estuary or firth, to judge by the bickering burn and the odors off-shore, above all the odour of rotting brake; and we rode at anchor, for her bows were up-water to the wind and tide, and above me, in the darkness, I could hear the idle sails faintly flapping in the breeze and the reef-points all tap-tapping. I seemed to have the deck alone, but for one figure at the stern; I went back, and found that it was Horn.

“Where are we?” I asked, relieved to find there the only man I could trust on board the ship.

“A little below Blackness,” said he shortly with a dissatisfied tone.

“I did not know we were to stop here,” said I, wondering if he knew that I was doomed.

“Neither did I,” said he, peering into the void of night. “And whit’s mair, I wish I could guess the reason o’ oor stopping. The skipper’s been ashore mair nor ance wi’ the lang-boat forward there, and I’m sent back here to keep an e’e on lord kens what except it be yersel’.”

“Are ye indeed?” said I, exceedingly vexed. “Then I ken too well, Horn, the reason for the stoppage. You are to keep your eye on a man who’s being bargained for with the hangman.”

“I would rather ken naithin’ about that,” said he, “and onyway I think ye’re mistaken. Here they’re comin’ back again.”

Two or three small boats were coming down on us out of the darkness; not that I could see them, but that I heard their oars in muffled rowlocks.

“If they want me,” said I sorrowfully, “they can find me down below,” and back I went and sat me in the cabin, prepared for the manacles.

CHAPTER X

THE STRUGGLE IN THE CABIN, AND AN EERIE SOUND OF RUNNING WATER

The place stank with bilge and the odour of an ill-trimmed lamp smoking from a beam; the fragments of the skipper’s supper were on the table, with a broken quadrant; rats scurried and squealed in the bulkheads, and one stared at me from an open locker, where lay a rum-bottle, while beetles and slaters travelled along the timbers. But these things compelled my attention less than the skylights that were masked internally by pieces of canvas nailed roughly on them. They were not so earlier in the evening; it must have been done after I had gone to sleep, and what could be the object? That puzzled me extremely, for it must have been the same hand that had extinguished all the deck and mast lights, and though black was my crime darkness was unnecessary to my betrayal.

I waited with a heart like lead.

I heard the boats swung up on the davits, the squeak of the falls, the tread of the seamen, the voice of Risk in an unusually low tone. In the bows in a little I heard the windlass click and the chains rasp in the hawse-holes; we were lifting the anchor.

For a moment hope possessed me. If we were weighing anchor then my arrest was not imminent at least; but that consolation lasted briefly when I thought of the numerous alternatives to imprisonment in Blackness.

We were under weigh again; there was a heel to port, and a more rapid plop of the waters along the carvel planks. And then Risk and his mate came down.

I have seldom seen a man more dashed than the skipper when he saw me sitting waiting on him, clothed and silent. His face grew livid; round he turned to Murchison and hurried him with oaths to come and clap eyes on this sea-clerk. I looked for the officer behind them, but they were alone, and at that I thought more cheerfully I might have been mistaken about the night’s curious proceedings.

“Anything wrang?” said Risk, affecting nonchalance now that his spate of oaths was by, and he pulled the rum out of the locker and helped himself and his mate to a swingeing caulker.

“Oh, nothing at all,” said I, “at least nothing that I know of, Captain Risk. And are we – are we – at Halifax already?”

“What do you mean?” said he. And then he looked at me closely, put out the hand unoccupied by his glass and ran an insolent dirty finger over my new-clipped mole. “Greig, Greig,” said he, “Greig to a hair! I would have the wee shears to that again, for its growin’.”

“You’re a very noticing man,” said I, striking down his hand no way gently, and remembering that he had seen my scissors when I emerged from the Borrowstouness close after my own barbering.

“I’m all that,” he replied, with a laugh, and all the time Murchison, the mate, sat mopping his greasy face with a rag, as one after hard work, and looked on us with wonder at what we meant. “I’m all that,” he replied, “the hair aff the mole and the horse-hair on your creased breeches wad hae tauld ony ane that ye had ridden in a hurry and clipped in a fricht o’ discovery.”

“Oh, oh!” I cried, “and that’s what goes to the makin’ o’ a Mahoun!”