Kitabı oku: «The Shoes of Fortune», sayfa 15
“Tuts! tuts, man!” said he shortly. “When the conies quarrel the quirky one (and that’s Sir Fox if ye like to ken) will get his own. There seems far too much delicacy about you, my friend, to be a sporran-soldier fighting for the best terms an army will give you. And what for need you grumble at my having found a purse in an empty house when it’s by virtue of the same we’re at this moment making our way to the sea?”
I could make no answer to that, for indeed I had had, like the other three wounded men in the cart with me, the full benefit of his purse, wherever he had found it, and but for that we had doubtless been mouldering in a Prussian prison.
It will be observed that MacKellar spoke of our making for the sea, and here it behoves that I should tell how that project arose.
When we had crossed the frontier the first time it was simply because it seemed the easiest way out of trouble, though it led us away from the remnants of the army. I had commented upon this the first night we stopped within the Netherlands, and the surgeon bluntly gave me his mind on the matter. The truth was, he said, that he was sick of his post and meant to make this the opportunity of getting quit of it.
I went as close as I dared upon a hint that the thing looked woundily like a desertion. He picked me up quick enough and counselled me to follow his example, and say farewell to so scurvy a service as that I had embarked on. His advices might have weighed less with me (though in truth I was sick enough of the Regiment d’Auvergne and a succession of defeats) if he had not told me that there was a certain man at Helvoetsluys he knew I should like to see.
“And who might that be?” I asked.
“Who but his reverence himself?” said Kilbride, who dearly loved an effect. “Yon night I met you in the Paris change-house it was planned by them I was with, one of them being Buhot himself of the police, that the old man must be driven out of his nest in the Hôtel Dieu, seeing they had got all the information they wanted from him, and I was one of the parties who was to carry this into effect. At the time I fancied Buhot was as keen upon yourself as upon the priest, and I thought I was doing a wonderfully clever thing to spy your red shoes and give you a warning to quit the priest, but all the time Buhot was only laughing at me, and saw you and recognised you himself in the change-house. Well, to make the long tale short, when we went to the hospital the birds were both of them gone, which was more than we bargained for, because some sort of trial was due to the priest though there was no great feeling against him. Where he had taken wing to we could not guess, but you will not hinder him to come on a night of nights (as we say) to the lodging I was tenanting at the time in the Rue Espade, and throw himself upon my mercy. The muckle hash! I’ll allow the insolency of the thing tickled me greatly. The man was a fair object, too; had not tasted food for two days, and captured my fancy by a tale I suppose there is no trusting, that he had given you the last few livres he had in the world.”
“That was true enough about the livres,” I said with gratitude.
“Was it, faith?” cried Kilbride. “Then I’m glad I did him the little service that lay in my power, which was to give him enough money to pay for posting to Helvoetsluys, where he is now, and grateful enough so far as I could gather from the last letters I had from him, and also mighty anxious to learn what became of his secretary.”
“I would give the last plack in my pocket to see the creature,” said I.
“Would you indeed?” said Kilbride. “Then here’s the road for you, and it must be a long furlough whatever of it from the brigade of Marshal Clermont.”
CHAPTER XXXV
BRINGS ME TO HELVOETSLUYS IN WINTER WEATHER
Kilbride and I parted company with the others once we had got within the lines of Holland; the cateran (as I would sometimes be calling him in a joke) giving them as much money as might take them leisuredly to the south they meant to make for, and he and I proceeded on our way across the country towards the mouth of the River Maas.
It was never my lot before nor since to travel with a more cheerful companion. Not the priest himself had greater humour in his composition, and what was more it was a jollity I was able the better to understand, for while much of Hamilton’s esprit missed the spark with me because it had a foreign savour, the pawkiness of Kilbride was just the marrow of that I had seen in folks at home. And still the man was strange, for often he had melancholies. Put him in a day of rain and wind and you would hear him singing like a laverock the daftest songs in Erse; or give him a tickle task at haggling in the language of signs with a broad-bottomed bargeman, or the driver of a rattel-van, and the fun would froth in him like froth on boiling milk.
Indeed, and I should say like cream, for this Mac-Kellar man had, what is common enough among the clans in spite of our miscalling, a heart of jeel for the tender moment and a heart of iron for the hard. But black, black, were his vapours when the sun shone, which is surely the poorest of excuses for dolours. I think he hated the flatness of the land we travelled in. To me it was none amiss, for though it was winter I could fancy how rich would be the grass of July in the polders compared with our poor stunted crops at home, and that has ever a cheerful influence on any man that has been bred in Lowland fields. But he (if I did not misread his eye) looked all ungratefully on the stretching leagues that ever opened before us as we sailed on waterways or jolted on the roads.
“I do not ken how it may be with you, Mr. Greig,” he said one day as, somewhere in Brabant, our sluggish vessel opened up a view of canal that seemed to stretch so far it pricked the eye of the setting sun, and the windmills whirled on either hand ridiculous like the games of children – “I do not ken how it may be with you, but I’m sick of this country. It’s no better nor a bannock, and me so fond of Badenoch!”
“Indeed and there’s a sameness about every part of it,” I confessed, “and yet it has its qualities. See the sun on yonder island – ‘tis pleasant enough to my notion, and as for the folk, they are not the cut of our own, but still they have very much in common with folks I’ve seen in Ayr.”
He frowned at that unbelievingly, and cast a sour eye upon some women that stood upon a bridge. “Troth!” said he, “you would not compare these limmers with our own. I have not seen a light foot and a right dark eye since ever I put the back of me to the town of Inverness in the year of ‘Fifty-six.’”
“Nor I since I left the Mearns,” I cried, suddenly thinking of Isobel and forgetting all that lay between that lass and me.
“Oh! oh!” cried Kilbride. “And that’s the way of it? Therms more than Clemie Walkinshaw, is there? I was ill to convince that a nephew of Andy Greig’s began the game at the age of twenty-odd with a lady that might have been his mother.”
I felt very much ashamed that he should have any knowledge of this part of my history, and seeing it he took to bantering me.
“Come, come!” said he, “you must save my reputation with myself for penetration, for I aye argued with Buhot that your tanglement with madame was something short of innocency for all your mim look, and he was for swearing the lady had found a fool.”
“I am beat to understand how my affairs came to be the topic of dispute with you and Buhot?” said I, astonished.
“And what for no’?” said he. “Wasn’t the man’s business to find out things, and would you have me with no interest in a ploy when it turned up? There were but the two ways of it – you were all the gomeral in love that Buhot thought you, or you were Andy Greig’s nephew and willing to win the woman’s favour (for all her antiquity) by keeping Buhot in the news of Hamilton’s movements.”
“Good God!” I cried, “that was a horrible alternative!” even then failing to grasp all that he implied.
“Maybe,” he said pawkily; “but you cannot deny you kept them very well informed upon your master’s movements, otherwise it had gone very hard perhaps with his Royal Highness.”
“Me!” I cried. “I would have as soon informed upon my father. And who was there to inform?”
Kilbride looked at me curiously as if he half doubted my innocence. “It is seldom I have found the man Buhot in a lie of the sort,” said he, “but he led me to understand that what information he had of the movements of the priest came from yourself.”
I jumped to my feet, and almost choked in denying it.
“Oh, very well, very well!” said Kilbride coolly. “There is no need to make a fracas about the matter. I am just telling you what Buhot told me. And troth! it was a circumstantial story he had of it; for he said that the Marshal Duke de Bellisle, and Monsieur Florentin, and Monsieur Berrier, and all the others of the Cabinet, had Fleuriau’s name and direction from yourself, and found the plot had some connection with the affair of Damiens. George Kelly, the Prince’s secretary, was another man that told me.” He gazed along the deck of the scow we sat in, as if thinking hard, and then turned to me with a hesitating suggestion. “Perhaps,” said he, “you are forgetting. Perhaps you wrote the woman and told her innocently enough, and that would come to the same thing.”
I was overwhelmed with confusion at the idea, though the possibility of my letters being used had once before occurred to me.
“Well, if you must know, it is true I wrote some letters to Miss Walkinshaw,” I confessed shamefacedly. “But they were very carefully transmitted by Bernard the Swiss to her, for I got her answers back.”
He burst out laughing.
“For simplicity you beat all!” cried he. “You sent your news through the Swiss, that was in Buhot’s pay, and took the charge from Hamilton’s pistols, and did his part in helping you to escape from jyle with a great degree of humour as those of us who knew what was afoot had to agree, and you think the man would swither about peeping into a letter you entrusted to him, particularly if it was directed to hersel’! The sleep-bag was under your head sure enough, as the other man said.”
“And I was the unconscious wretch that betrayed our hiding in the Hôtel Dieu!” I cried with much chagrin, seeing at a flash what all this meant. “If I had Bernard here I could thraw his neck.”
“Indeed,” said he, “and what for should it be Bernard? The man but did what he was told, and there, by my troth! when I think of it, I’m no’ so sure that he was any different from yourself.”
“What do you mean?” said I.
“Oh, just that hersel’ told you to keep her informed of your movements and you did so. In Bernard and you she had a pair of spies instead of only the one had she trusted in either.”
“And what in all the world would she be doing that for?”
“What but for her lover the prince?” said he with a sickening promptness that some way left me without a doubt he spoke with knowledge. “Foul fa’ the day he ever clapt eyes on her! for she has the cunning of the fox, though by all accounts a pleasant person. They say she has a sister that’s in the service of the queen at St. James’s, and who kens but for all her pretended affection for Tearlach she may be playing all the time into the hands of his enemies? She made you and this Bernard the means of putting an end to the Jesuit plot upon his Royal Highness by discovering the source of it, and now the Jesuits, as I’m told, are to be driven furth the country and putten to the horn.”
I was stunned by this revelation of what a tool I had been in the hands of one I fancied briefly that I was in love with. For long I sat silent pondering on it, and at last unable to make up my mind whether I should laugh or swear. Kilbride, while affecting to pay no heed to me, was keen enough to see my perturbation, and had, I think, a sort of pride that he had been able to display such an astuteness.
“I’m afraid,” said I at last, “there is too much probability in all that you have said and thought. I am a stupendous ass, Mr. MacKellar, and you are a very clever man.”
“Not at all, not at all!” he protested hurriedly. “I have just some natural Hielan’ interest in affairs of intrigue, and you have not (by your leave) had my advantages of the world, for I have seen much of the evil as well as the good of it, and never saw a woman’s hand in aught yet but I wondered what mischief she was planning. There’s much, I’m telling you, to be learned about a place like Fontainebleau or Versailles, and I advantaged myself so well of my opportunities there that you could not drive a hole but I would put a nail in it, as the other man said.”
“Well,” said I, “my hope is that I may never meet the woman again, and that’s without a single angry feeling to her.”
“You need not fear about that,” said he. “The thing that does not lie in your road will never break your leg, as the other man said, and I’ll be surprised if she puts herself in your way again now that her need for you is done. A score of your friends in Dunkerque could have told you that she was daft about him. I might be vexed for you if I did not know from your own mouth of the other one in Mearns.”
“We’ll say nothing about that,” I says, “for that’s a tale that’s by wi’. She’s lost to me.”
He gave a little chuckle and had that turn in the eye that showed he had a curious thought.
“What are you laughing at?” I asked. “Oh, just an old word we have in the Language, that with a two-deer stag-hound it will be happening often that a stag’s amissing.”
“There’s another thing I would like you to tell me out of your experience,” I said, “and that is the reason for the Prince’s doing me a good turn with the one hand and a bad one with the other; using his efforts to get me the lieutenancy and at the same time putting a man on my track to quarrel with me?”
“It’s as plain as the nose on your face,” he cried. “It was no great situation he got you when it was in the Regiment d’Auvergne, as you have discovered, but it would be got I’ll warrant on the pressure of the Walkinshaw one. Just because she had that interest in you to press him for the post, and you were in the trim to keep up a correspondence with her (though in his own interest, as he must know, so far as she was concerned), he would want you out of the road. Love is like lairdship, Hazel Den, and it puts up very poorly with fellowship, as the other man said.”
I thought of the occasions when his Royal Highness had seen me at night in front of a certain window in the Rue de la Boucherie, and concluded that Kilbride in this too had probably hit the mark.
And so we passed through Holland in many changes of weather that finally turned to a black frost, which covered the canals with ice whereon skated the Dutch folks very pleasantly, but we were the losers, as the rest of our journey had to be made by post.
It was well on in the winter when we got to Helvoetsluys.
CHAPTER XXXVI
FATHER HAMILTON IS THREATENED BY THE JESUITS AND WE ARE FORCED TO FLY AGAIN
The priest, poor man! aged a dozen years by his anxieties since I had seen him last, was dubious of his senses when I entered where he lodged, and he wept like a bairn to see my face again.
“Scotland! Scotland! beshrew me, child, and I’d liefer have this than ten good dinners at Verray’s!” cried he, and put his arms about my shoulders and buried his face in my waistcoat to hide his uncontrollable tears.
He was quartered upon a pilot of the Schelde and Hollands Deep, whose only child he made a shift to tutor in part payment of his costs, and the very moment that we had come in upon him he was full of a matter that had puzzled him for weeks before we came to Helvoetsluys. ‘Twas a thing that partly hurt his pride, though that may seem incredible, and partly gave him pleasure, and ‘twas merely that when he had at last found his concealment day and night in the pilot’s house unendurable, and ventured a stroll or two upon the dunes in broad sunshine, no one paid any attention to him. There were soldiers and sailors that must have some suspicions of his identity, and he had himself read his own story and description in one of the gazettes, yet never a hand was raised to capture him.
“Ma foi! Paul,” he cried to me in a perplexity. “I am the most marvellous priest unfrocked, invisible to the world as if I had Mambrino’s helmet. Sure it cannot be that I am too stale quarry for their hunting! My amour propre baulks at such conclusion. I that have – heaven help me! – loaded pistols against the Lord’s anointed, might as well have gone shooting sparrows for all the infamy it has gained me. But yesterday I passed an officer of the peace that cried ‘Bon jour, father,’ in villainous French with a smile so sly I could swear he knew my history from the first breeching. I avow that my hair stirred under my hat when he said it.”
MacKellar stood by contemptuous of the priest’s raptures over his restored secretary.
“Goodness be about us!” he said, “what a pity the brock should be hiding when there’s nobody hunting him! The first squirt of the haggis is always the hottest, as the other man said. If they were keen on your track at the start of it – and it’s myself has the doubt of that same – you may warrant they are slack on it now. It’s Buhot himself would be greatly put about if you went to the jail and put out your hands for the manacles.”
Father Hamilton looked bewildered.
“Expiscate, good Monsieur MacKellar,” said he.
“Kilbride just means,” said I, “that you are in the same case as myself, and that orders have gone out that no one is to trouble you.”
He believed it, and still he was less cheerful than I looked for. “Indeed, ‘tis like enough,” he sighed. “I have put my fat on a trap for a fortnight back to catch my captors and never a rat of them will come near me, but pass with sniffing noses. And yet on my word I have little to rejoice for. My friends have changed coats with my enemies because they swear I betrayed poor Fleuriau. I’d sooner die on the rack – ”
“Oh, Father Hamilton!” I could not help crying, with remorse upon my countenance. He must have read the story in a single glance at me, for he stammered and took my hand.
“What! there too, Scotland!” he said. “I forswear the company of innocence after this. No matter, ‘tis never again old Dixmunde parish for poor Father Hamilton that loved his flock well enough and believed the best of everybody and hated the confessional because it made the world so wicked. My honey-bees will hum next summer among another’s flowers, and my darling blackbirds will be all starving in this pestilent winter weather. Paul, Paul, hear an old man’s wisdom – be frugal in food, and raiment, and pleasure, and let thy ambitions flutter, but never fly too high to come down at a whistle. But here am I, old Pater Dull, prating on foolish little affairs, and thou and our honest friend here new back from the sounding of the guns. Art a brave fighter, lad? I heard of thee in the grenadier company of d’Auvergne.”
“We did the best part of our fighting with our shanks, as the other man said,” cried Kilbride. “But Mr. Greig came by a clout that affected his mind and made him clean forget the number of his regiment, and that is what for the lowlands of Holland is a very pleasant country just now.”
“Wounded!” cried the priest, disturbed at this intelligence. “Had I known on’t I should have prayed for thy deliverance.”
“I have little doubt he did that for himself,” said Kilbride. “When I came on him after Rosbach he was behind a dyke, that is not a bad alternative for prayer when the lead is in the air.”
We made up our minds to remain for a while at Helvoet, but we had not determined what our next step should be, when in came the priest one day with his face like clay and his limbs trembling.
“Ah, Paul!” he cried, and fell into a chair; “here’s Nemesis, daughter of Nox, a scurvy Italian, and wears a monkish cowl. I fancied it were too good to be true that I should be free from further trials.”
“Surely Buhot has not taken it into his head to move again,” I cried. “That would be very hirpling justice after so long an interval. And in any case they could scarcely hale you out of the Netherlands.”
“No, lad, not Buhot,” said he, perspiring with his apprehensions, “but the Society. There’s one Gordoletti, a pretended Lutheran that hails from Jena, that has been agent between the Society and myself before now, and when I was out there he followed me upon the street with the eyes of a viper. I’ll swear the fellow has a poignard and means the letting of blood. I know how ‘twill be – a watch set upon this building, Gordoletti upon the steps some evening; a jostle, a thrust, and a speeding shade. A right stout shade too! if spirits are in any relation of measure to the corporeal clay. Oh, lad, what do I say? my sinner’s wit must be evincing in the front of doom itself.”
I thought he simply havered, but found there was too real cause for his distress. That afternoon the monk walked up and down the street without letting his eyes lose a moment’s sight of the entrance to the pilot’s house where Father Hamilton abode. I could watch him all the better because I shared a room with Kilbride on the same side of the street, and even to me there was something eerie in the sight of this long thin stooping figure in its monkish garment, slouching on the stones or hanging over the parapet of the bridge, his eyes, lambent black and darting, over his narrow chafts. Perhaps it was but fancy, yet I thought I saw in the side of his gown the unmistakable bulge of a dagger. He paced the street for hours or leaned over the parapet affecting an interest in the barges, and all the time the priest sat fascinated within, counting his sentence come.
“Oh, by my faith and it is not so bad as that,” I protested on returning to find him in this piteous condition. “Surely there are two swords here that at the worst of it can be depended on to protect you.”
He shook his head dolefully. “It is no use, Paul,” he cried. “The poignard or the phial – ‘tis all the same to them or Gordoletti, and hereafter I dare not touch a drop of wine or indulge in a meagre soup.”
“But surely,” I said, “there may be a mistake, and this Gordoletti may have nothing to do with you.”
“The man wears a cowl – a monkish cowl – and that is enough for me. A Jesuit out of his customary soutane is like the devil in dancing shoes – be sure his lordship means mischief. Oh! Paul, I would I were back in Bicêtre and like to die there cleaner than on the banks of a Dutch canal. I protest I hate to think of dying by a canal.”
Still I was incredulous that harm was meant to him, and he proceeded to tell me the Society of Jesus was upon the brink of dissolution, and desperate accordingly. The discovery of Fleuriau’s plot against the Prince had determined the authorities upon the demolition and extinction of the Jesuits throughout the whole of the King’s dominion. Their riches and effects and churches were to be seized to the profit and emolument of the Crown; the reverend Fathers were to be banished furth of France for ever. Designs so formidable had to be conducted cautiously, and so far the only evidence of a scheme against the Society was to be seen in the Court itself, where the number of priests of the order was being rapidly diminished.
I thought no step of the civil power too harsh against the band of whom the stalking man in the cowl outside was representative, and indeed the priest at last half-infected myself with his terrors. We sat well back from the window looking out upon the street till it was dusk. There was never a moment when the assassin (as I still must think him) was not there, his interest solely in the house we sat in. And when it was wholly dark, and a single lamp of oil swinging on a cord across the thoroughfare lit the passage of the few pedestrians that went along the street, Gordoletti was still close beneath it, silent, meditating, and alert.
MacKellar came in from his coffee-house. We sat in darkness, except for the flicker of a fire of peat. He must have thought the spectacle curious.
“My goodness!” cried he, “candles must be unco dear in this shire when the pair of you cannot afford one between you to see each other yawning. I’m of a family myself that must be burning a dozen at a time and at both ends to make matters cheery, for it’s a gey glum world at the best of it.”
He stumbled over to the mantel-shelf where there was customarily a candle; found and lit it, and held it up to see if there was any visible reason for our silence.
The priest’s woebegone countenance set him into a shout of laughter. His amusement scarcely lessened when he heard of the ominous gentleman in the cowl.
“Let me see!” he said, and speedily devised a plan to test the occasion of Father Hamilton’s terrors. He arranged that he should dress himself in the priest’s garments, and as well as no inconsiderable difference in their bulk might let him, simulate the priest by lolling into the street.
“A brave plan verily,” quo’ the priest, “but am I a bowelless rogue to let another have my own particular poignard? No, no, Messieurs, let me pay for my own pots cassés and run my own risks in my own soutane.”
With that he rose to his feet and was bold enough to offer a trial that was attended by considerable hazard.
It was determined, however, that I should follow close upon the heels of Kilbride in his disguise, prepared to help him in the case of too serious a surprise.
The night was still. There were few people in the street, which was one of several that led down to the quays. The sky had but a few wan stars. When MacKellar stepped forth in the priest’s hat and cloak, he walked slowly towards the harbour, ludicrously imitating the rolling gait of his reverence, while I stayed for a little in the shelter of the door. Gordoletti left his post upon the bridge and stealthily followed Kilbride. I gave him some yards of law and followed Gordoletti.
Our footsteps sounded on the stones; ‘twas all that broke the evening stillness except the song of a roysterer who staggered upon the quays. The moment was fateful in its way and yet it ended farcically, for ere he had gained the foot of the street Kilbride turned and walked back to meet the man that stalked him. We closed upon the Italian to find him baffled and confused.
“Take that for your attentions!” cried Kilbride, and buffeted the fellow on the ear, a blow so secular and telling from a man in a frock that Gordoletti must have thought himself bewitched, for he gave a howl and took to his heels. Kilbride attempted to stop him, but the cassock escaped his hands and his own unwonted costume made a chase hopeless. As for me, I was content to let matters remain as they were now that Father Hamilton’s suspicions seemed too well founded.
It did not surprise me that on learning of our experience the priest should determine on an immediate departure from Helvoetsluys. But where he was to go was more than he could readily decide. He proposed and rejected a score of places – Bordeaux, Flanders, the Hague, Katwyk farther up the coast, and many others – weighing the advantages of each, enumerating his acquaintances in each, discovering on further thought that each and every one of them had some feature unfavourable to his concealment from the Jesuits.
“You would be as long tuning your pipes as another would be playing a tune,” said Kilbride at last. “There’s one thing sure of it, that you cannot be going anywhere the now without Mr. Greig and myself, and what ails you at Dunkerque in which we have all of us acquaintances?”
A season ago the suggestion would have set my heart in flame; but now it left me cold. Yet I backed up the proposal, for I reflected that (keeping away from the Rue de la Boucherie) we might there be among a good many friends. Nor was his reverence ill to influence in favour of the proposal.
The next morning saw us, then, upon a hoy that sailed for Calais and was bargained to drop us at Dunkerque.
