Kitabı oku: «The Shoes of Fortune», sayfa 8
She stopped suddenly, looked at me and got very red in the face.
“A fine picture, Miss Walkinshaw!” said I, with something drumming at my heart. “It is not just altogether like Isobel Fortune, who has long syne forgot but to detest me, but I fancy I know who it is like.”
“And who might that be?” she asked in a low voice and with a somewhat guilty look.
“Will I tell you?” I asked, myself alarmed at my boldness.
“No! no! never mind,” she cried. “I was just making a picture of a girl I once knew – poor lass! and of what she might have been. But she’s dead – dead and buried. I hope, after all, your Isobel is a nobler woman than the one I was thinking on and a happier destiny awaiting her.”
“That cannot matter much to me now,” I said, “for, as I told you, there is nothing any more between us – except – except a corp upon the heather.”
She shuddered as she did the first time I told her of my tragedy, and sucked in the air again through her clenched teeth.
“Poor lad! poor lad!” said she. “And you have quite lost her. If so, and the thing must be, then this glass coach of Father Hamilton’s must take you to the country of forgetfulness. I wish I could drive there myself this minute, but wae’s me, there’s no chariot at the remise that’ll do that business for John Walkinshaw’s girl.”
Something inexpressively moving was in her mien, all her heart was in her face as it seemed; a flash of fancy came to me that she was alone in the world with nothing of affection to hap her round from its abrasions, and that her soul was crying out for love. Sweet beyond expression was this woman and I was young; up to my feet I rose, and turned on her a face that must have plainly revealed my boyish passion.
“Miss Walkinshaw,” I said, “you may put me out of this door for ever, but I’m bound to say I’m going travelling in no glass coach; Dunkerque will be doing very well for me.”
Her lips trembled; her cheek turned pale; she placed a hand upon her breast, and there was I contrite before her anger!
“Is this – is this your respect and your esteem, Mr. Greig?” she asked brokenly.
“They were never greater than at this moment,” I replied.
“And how are they to be manifested by your waiting on in Dunkerque?” she asked, recovering her colour and some of her ordinary manner.
How indeed? She had no need to ask me the question, for it was already ringing through my being. That the Spoiled Horn from Mearns, an outlaw with blood on his hands and borrowed money in his pocket, should have the presumption to feel any ardour for this creature seemed preposterous to myself, and I flushed in an excess of shame and confusion.
This seemed completely to reassure her. “Oh, Mr. Greig – Mr. Greig, was I not right to ask if ye were the man ye seemed? Here’s a nice display o’ gallantry from my giant son! I believe you are just makin’ fun o’ this auld wife; and if no’ I hae just one word for you, Paul Greig, and it’s this that I said afore – jist havers!”
She went to her spinet and ran her fingers over the keys and broke into a song —
Oh, what ails the laddie, new twined frae his mither?
The laddie gallantin’ roun’ Tibbie and me? —
with glances coquettish yet repelling round her shoulder at me as I stood turning my chapeau-de-bras in my hand as a boy turns his bonnet in presence of laird or dominie. The street was shaking now with the sound of marching soldiers, whose platoons were passing in a momentary silence of trumpet or drum. All at once the trumpets blared forth just in front of the house, broke upon her song, and gave a heavensent diversion to our comedy or tragedy or whatever it was in the parlour.
We both stood looking out at the window for a while in silence, watching the passing troops, and when the last file had gone, she turned with a change of topic “If these men had been in England ten years ago,” she said, “when brisk affairs were doing there with Highland claymores, your Uncle Andrew would have been there, too, and it would not perhaps be your father who was Laird of Hazel Den. But that’s all by with now. And when do you set out with Father Hamilton?”
She had a face as serene as fate; my heart ached to tell her that I loved her, but her manner made me hold my tongue on that.
“In three days,” I said, still turning my hat and wishing myself elsewhere, though her presence intoxicated.
“In three days!” she said, as one astonished. “I had thought it had been a week at the earliest. Will I tell you what you might do? You are my great blate bold son, you know, from the moors of Mearns, and I will be wae, wae, to think of you travelling all round Europe without a friend of your own country to exchange a word with. Write to me; will you?”
“Indeed and I will, and that gaily,” I cried, delighted at the prospect.
“And you will tell me all your exploits and where you have been and what you have seen, and where you are going and what you are going to do, and be sure there will be one Scots heart thinking of you (besides Isobel, I daresay), and I declare to you this one will follow every league upon the map, saying ‘the blate lad’s there to-day,’ ‘the blate lad’s to be here at noon to-morrow.’ Is it a bargain? Because you know I will write to you – but oh! I forgot; what of the priest? Not for worlds would I have him know that I kept up a correspondence with his secretary. That is bad.”
She gazed rather expectantly at me as if looking for a suggestion, but the problem was beyond me, and she sighed.
“Of course his reverence need not know anything about it,” she said then.
“Certainly,” I acquiesced, jumping at so obvious a solution. “I will never mention to him anything about it.”
“But how will I get your letters and how will you get mine without his suspecting something?”
“Oh, but he cannot suspect.”
“What, and he a priest, too! It’s his trade, Mr. Greig, and this Father Hamilton would spoil all if he knew we were indulging ourselves so innocently. What you must do is to send your letters to me in a way that I shall think of before you leave and I shall answer in the same way. But never a word, remember, to his reverence; I depend on your honour for that.”
As I was going down the stair a little later, she leaned over the bannister and cried after me:
“Mr. Greig,” said she, “ye needna’ be sae hainin’ wi’ your red shoes when ye’re traivellin’ in the coach. I would be greatly pleased to be thinkin’ of you as traivellin’ in them a’ the time.”
I looked up and saw her smiling saucily at me over the rail.
“Would you indeed?” said I. “Then I’ll never put them aff till I see ye again, when I come back to Dunkerque.”
“That is kind,” she answered, laughing outright, “but fair reediculous. To wear them to bed would be against your character for sobriety.”
CHAPTER XIX
A RAP IN THE EARLY MORNING AWAKENS ME AND I START IN A GLASS COACH UPON THE ODDEST OF JOURNEYS
It was the last, for many months, I was to see of my countrywoman. Before the crow of the cock next morning I was on the unending roads, trundling in a noisy vehicle through pitch darkness, my companion snoring stertorous at my side, his huge head falling every now and then upon my shoulder, myself peering to catch some revelation of what manner of country-side we went through as the light from the swinging lanthorn lit up briefly passing banks of frosted hedge or sleeping hamlets on whose pave the hoofs of our horses hammered as they had been the very war-steeds of Bellona.
But how came I there? How but by my master’s whim, that made him anticipate his departure by three days and drag me from my bed incontinent to set out upon his trip over Europe.
I had been sleeping soundly, dreaming I heard the hopper of the mill of Driepps at home banging to make Jock Alexander’s fortune, when I awakened, or rather half-wakened, to discover that ‘twas no hopper but a nieve at my door, rapping with a vigour to waken the dead.
“Come out! Sir Secretary, come out! or I shall pull thy domicile about thine ears,” cried the voice of Father Hamilton.
He stood at the door when I opened, wrapped over the chin in a muffler of multitudinous folds, and covered by a roquelaure.
“Pax!” he cried, thrusting a purple face into the room, “and on with thy boots like a good lad. We must be off and over the dunes before the bell of St. Eloi knocks another nail in the coffin of time.”
“What!” I said, dumbfoundered, “are we to start on our journey to-day?”
“Even so, my sluggardly Scot; faith! before the day even, for the day will be in a deuce of a hurry an’ it catch up on us before we reach Pont-Opoise. Sop a crust in a jug of wine – I’ve had no better petit déjeuner myself – put a clean cravat and a pair of hose in thy sack, and in all emulate the judicious flea that wastes no time in idle rumination, but transacts its affairs in a succession of leaps.”
“And no time to say good-bye to anyone?” I asked, struggling into my toilet.
“La! la! la! the flea never takes a congé that I’ve heard on, Master Punctilio. Not so much as a kiss o’ the hand for you; I have had news, and ‘tis now or never.”
Twenty minutes later, Thurot’s landlord (for Thurot himself was from home) lit me to the courtyard, and the priest bundled me and my sack into the bowels of an enormous chariot waiting there.
The clocks began to strike the hour of five; before the last stroke had ceased to shiver the darkness we were thundering along the sea front and my master was already composed to sleep in his corner, without vouchsafing me a sentence of explanation for so hurried a departure. Be sure my heart was sore! I felt the blackest of ingrates to be thus speeding without a sign of farewell from a place where I had met with so much of friendship.
Out at the window of the coach I gazed, to see nothing but the cavernous night on one side, on the other, lit by the lanthorn, the flashing past of houses all shuttered and asleep.
It was dry and pleasant weather, with a sting of frost in the air, and the propinquity of the sea manifest not in its plangent voice alone but in the odour of it that at that hour dominated the natural smells of the faubourgs. Only one glimpse I had of fellow creatures; as we passed the fort, the flare of flambeaux showed an enormous body of soldiers working upon the walls of Risebank; it but added to the poignance of my melancholy to reflect that here were my country’s enemies unsleeping, and I made a sharp mental contrast of this most dauntening spectacle with a picture of the house of Hazel Den dreaming among its trees, and only crying lambs perhaps upon the moor to indicate that any life was there. Melancholy! oh, it was eerie beyond expression for me that morning! Outside, the driver talked to his horses and to some one with him on the boot; it must have been cheerier for him than for me as I sat in that sombre and close interior, jolted by my neighbour, and unable to refrain from rehabilitating all the past. Especially did I think of my dark home-coming with a silent father on the day I left the college to go back to the Mearns. And by a natural correlation, that was bound to lead to all that followed – even to the event for which I was now so miserably remote from my people.
Once or twice his reverence woke, to thrust his head out at the window and ask where we were. Wherever we were when he did so, *twas certain never to be far enough for his fancy, and he condemned the driver for a snail until the whip cracked wickedly and the horses laboured more strenuously than ever, so that our vehicle swung upon its springs till it might well seem we were upon a ship at sea.
For me he had but the one comment – “I wonder what’s for déjeuner.” He said it each time solemnly as it were his matins, and then slid into his swinish sleep again.
The night seemed interminable, but by-and-by the day broke. I watched it with eagerness as it gradually paled the east, and broke up the black bulk of the surrounding land into fields, orchards, gardens, woods. And the birds awoke – God bless the little birds! – they woke, and started twittering and singing in the haze, surely the sweetest, the least sinless of created things, the tiny angels of the woods, from whom, walking in summer fields in the mornings of my age as of my youth, I have borrowed hope and cheer.
Father Hamilton wakened too, and heard the birds; indeed, they filled the ear of the dawn with melodies. A smile singularly pleasant came upon his countenance as he listened.
“Pardieu!” said he, “how they go on! Has’t the woodland soul, Sieur Croque-mort? Likely enough not; I never knew another but myself and thine uncle that had it, and ‘tis the mischief that words will not explain the same. ‘Tis a gift of the fairies” – here he crossed himself devoutly and mumbled a Romish incantation – “that, having the said woodland spirit – in its nature a Pagan thing perchance, but n’importe!– thou hast in the song of the tiny beings choiring there something to make the inward tremor that others find in a fiddle and a glass of wine. No! no! not that, ‘tis a million times more precious; ‘tis – ‘tis the pang of the devotee, ‘tis the ultimate thrill of things. Myself, I could expire upon the ecstasy of the thrush, or climb to heaven upon the lark’s May rapture. And there they go! the loves! and they have the same ditty I heard from them first in Louvain. There are but three clean things in this world, my lad of Scotland – a bird, a flower, and a child’s laughter. I have been confessor long enough to know all else is filth. But what’s the luck in waiting for us at Azincourt? and what’s the pot-au-feu to-day?”
He listened a little longer to the birds, and fell asleep smiling, his fat face for once not amiss, and I was left again alone as it were to receive the day.
We had long left the dunes and the side of the sea, though sometimes on puffs of wind I heard its distant rumour. Now the land was wooded with the apple tree; we rose high on the side of a glen, full of a rolling fog that streamed off as the day grew. A tolerable land enough; perhaps more lush than my own, with scarce a rood uncultivated, and dotted far and wide by the strangest farm steadings and pendicles, but such steadings and pendicles as these eyes never before beheld, with enormous eaves of thatch reaching almost to the ground, and ridiculous windows of no shape; with the yokings of the cattle, the boynes, stoups, carts, and ploughs about the places altogether different from our own. We passed troops marching, peasants slouching with baskets of poultry to market towns, now and then a horseman, now and then a caleche. And there were numerous hamlets, and at least two middling-sized towns, and finally we came, at the hour of eleven, upon the place appointed for our déjeuner. It was a small inn on the banks of the only rivulet I had seen in all the journey. I forget its name, but I remember there was a patch of heather on the side of it, and that I wished ardently the season had been autumn that I might have looked upon the purple bells.
“Tis a long lane that has no tavern,” said his reverence, and oozed out of his side of the coach with groanings. The innkeeper ran forth, louted, and kissed his hand.
“Jour, m’sieu jour!” said Father Hamilton hurriedly. “And now, what have you here that is worth while?”
The innkeeper respectfully intimated that the church of Saint-Jean-en-Grève was generally considered worth notice. Its vestments, relics, and windows were of merit, and the view from the tower —
“Mort de ma vie!” cried the priest angrily, “do I look like a traveller who trots up belfrys in strange villages at the hour of déjeuner? A plague on Saint-Jean-en-Grève! I said nothing at all of churches; I spoke of déjeuner, my good fellow. What’s for déjeuner?”
The innkeeper recounted a series of dishes. Father Hamilton hummed and hawed, reflected, condemned, approved, all with an eagerness beyond description. And when the meal was being dished up, he went frantically to the kitchen and lifted pot-lids, and swung a salad for himself, and confounding the ordinary wine for the vilest piquette ordered a special variety from the cellar. It was a spectacle of gourmandise not without its humour; I was so vastly engaged in watching him that I scarce glanced at the men who had travelled on the outside of the coach since morning.
What was my amazement when I did so to see that the servant or valet (as he turned out to be) was no other than the Swiss, Bernard, who had been in the service of Miss Walkinshaw no later than yesterday morning!
I commented on the fact to Father Hamilton when we sat down to eat.
“Why, yes!” he said, gobbling at his vivers with a voracity I learned not to wonder at later when I knew him more. “The same man. A good man, too, or I’m a Turk. I’ve envied Miss Walkinshaw this lusty, trusty, secret rogue for a good twelvemonth, and just on the eve of my leaving Dunkerque, by a very providence, the fellow gets drunk and finds himself dismissed. He came to me with a flush and a hiccough last night to ask a recommendation, and overlooking the peccadillo that is not of a nature confined to servants, Master Greig, let me tell thee, I gave him a place in my entourage. Madame will not like it, but no matter! she’ll have time to forget it ere I see her again.”
I felt a mild satisfaction to have the Swiss with us just because I had heard him called “Bernard” so often by his late employer.
We rested for some hours after déjeuner, seated under a tree by the brink of the rivulet, and in the good humour of a man satisfied in nature the priest condescended to let me into some of his plans.
We were bound for Paris in the first place. “Zounds!” he cried, “I am all impatience to clap eyes again on Lutetia, the sweet rogue, and eat decent bread and behold a noble gown and hear a right cadenza. And though thou hast lost thy Lyrnessides – la! la! la! I have thee there! – thou canst console thyself with the Haemonian lyre. Paris! oh, lad, I’d give all to have thy years and a winter or two in it. Still, we shall make shift – oh, yes! I warrant thee we shall make shift. We shall be there, at my closest reckoning, on the second day of Holy Week, and my health being so poorly we shall not wait to commence de faire les Pâques an hour after. What’s in a soutane, anyhow, that it should be permitted to mortify an honest priest’s oesophagus?”
I sighed in spite of myself, for he had made me think of our throwing of Easter eggs on the green at Hazel Den.
“What!” he cried. “Does my frugal Scot fancy we have not enough trinkgeld for enjoyment. Why, look here! – and here! – and here!”
He thrust his hand into his bosom and drew forth numerous rouleaux – so many that I thought his corpulence might well be a plethora of coin.
“There!” said he, squeezing a rouleau till it burst and spreading out the gold upon the table before him. “Am I a poor parish priest or a very Croesus?”
Then he scooped in the coins with his fat hands and returned all to his bosom. “Allons!” he said shortly; we were on the road again!
That night we put up at the Bon Accueil in a town whose name escapes my recollection.
He had gone to bed; through the wall from his chamber came the noise of his sleep, while I was at the writing of my first letter to Miss Walkinshaw, making the same as free and almost affectionate as I had been her lover, for as I know it now, I was but seeking in her for the face of the love of the first woman and the last my heart was given to.
I had scarcely concluded when the Swiss came knocking softly to my door, and handed me a letter from the very woman whose name was still in wet ink upon my folded page. I tore it open eagerly, to find a score of pleasant remembrances. She had learned the night before that the priest was to set out in the morning: “I have kept my word,” she went on. “Your best friend is Bernard, so I let you have him, and let us exchange our billets through him. It will be the most Discreet method. And I am, with every consideration, Ye Ken Wha.”
CHAPTER XX
LEADS ME TO THE FRONT OF A COFFEE-HOUSE WHERE I AM STARTLED TO SEE A FACE I KNOW
The occasion for this precaution in our correspondence was beyond my comprehension; nevertheless I was too proud to have the patronage of so fine a woman to cavil at what system she should devise for its discreet conduct, and the Swiss that night got my first letter to frank and despatch. He got one next evening also, and the evening after that; in short, I made a diurnal of each stage in our journey and Bernard was my postman – so to name it – on every occasion that I forwarded the same to Miss Walkinshaw. He assured me that he was in circumstances to secure the more prompt forwardation of my epistles than if I trusted in the common runner, and it was a proof of this that when we got, after some days, into Versailles, he should bring to me a letter from the lady herself informing me how much of pleasure she had got from the receipt of the first communication I had sent her.
Perhaps it is a sign of the injudicious mind that I should not be very mightily pleased with this same Versailles. We had come into it of a sunny afternoon and quartered at the Cerf d’Or Inn, and went out in the evening for the air. Somehow the place gave me an antagonism; its dipt trees all in rows upon the wayside like a guard of soldiers; its trim gardens and bits of plots; its fountains crying, as it seemed, for attention – these things hurt me as a liberty taken with nature. Here, thought I, is the fitting place for the raff in ruffles and the scented wanton; it should be the artificial man and the insincere woman should be condemned to walk for ever in these alleys and drink in these bosquets; I would not give a fir planting black against the evening sky at home for all this pompous play-acting at landscape, nor a yard of the brown heather of the hills for all these well-drilled flower parterres.
“Eh! M. Croque-mort,” said the priest, delighted visibly with all he saw about him; “what think’st thou of Le Notre’s gardening?”
“A good deal, sir,” I said, “that need never be mentioned. I feel a pity for the poor trees as I did for yon dipt poodle dog at Griepon.”
“La! la! la! sots raissonable, Monsieur,” cried the priest. “We cannot have the tastes of our Dubarrys and Pompadours and Maintenons so called in question by an untravelled Scot that knows but the rude mountain and stunted oaks dying in a murrain of climate. ‘Art too ingenuous, youth. And yet – and yet” – here he paused and tapped his temple and smiled whimsically – “between ourselves, I prefer the woods of Somme where the birds sang together so jocund t’other day. But there now – ah, quelle gloire!”
We had come upon the front of the palace, and its huge far-reaching masonry, that I learned later to regard as cold, formal, and wanting in a soul, vastly discomposed me. I do not know why it should be so, but as I gazed at this – the greatest palace I had ever beheld – I felt tears rush irrestrainably to my eyes. Maybe it was the poor little poet in MacGibbon’s law chamber in Lanark town that used to tenant every ancient dwelling with spirits of the past, cropped up for the moment in Father Hamilton’s secretary, and made me, in a flash, people the place with kings – and realise something of the wrench it must have been and still would be to each and all of them to say adieu at the long last to this place of noisy grandeur where they had had their time of gaiety and splendour. Anyhow, I well-nigh wept, and the priest was quick to see it.
“Fore God!” he cried, “here’s Andrew Greig again! ‘Twas the wickedest rogue ever threw dice, and yet the man must rain at the eyes like a very woman.”
And yet he was pleased, I thought, to see me touched. A band was playing somewhere in a garden unseen; he tapped time to its music with his finger tips against each other and smiled beatifically and hummed. He seemed at peace with the world and himself at that moment, yet a second later he was the picture of distress and apprehension.
We were going towards the Place d’Armes; he had, as was customary, his arm through mine, leaning on me more than was comfortable, for he was the poorest judge imaginable of his own corpulence. Of a sudden I felt him jolt as if he had been startled, and then he gripped my arm with a nervous grasp. All that was to account for his perturbation was that among the few pedestrians passing us on the road was one in a uniform who cast a rapid glance at us. It was not wonderful that he should do so, for indeed we were a singularly ill-assorted pair, but there was a recognition of the priest in the glance the man in the uniform threw at him in passing. Nothing was said; the man went on his way and we on ours, but looking at Father Hamilton I saw his face had lost its colour and grown blotched in patches. His hand trembled; for the rest of the walk he was silent, and he could not too soon hurry us back to the Cerf d’Or.
Next day was Sunday, and Father Hamilton went to Mass leaving me to my own affairs, that were not of that complexion perhaps most becoming on that day to a lad from Scotland. He came back anon and dressed most scrupulously in a suit of lay clothing.
“Come out, Master Greig,” said he, “and use thine eyes for a poor priest that has ruined his own in studying the Fathers and seeking for honesty.”
“It is not in the nature of a compliment to myself, that,” I said, a little tired of his sour sentiments regarding humanity, and not afraid in the least to tell him so.
“Eh!” said he. “I spoke not of thee, thou savage. A plague on thy curt temper; ‘twas ever the weakness of the Greigs. Come, and I shall show thee a house where thy uncle and I had many a game of dominoes.”
We went to a coffee-house and watched the fashionable world go by. It was a sight monstrously fine. Because it was the Easter Sunday the women had on their gayest apparel, the men their most belaced jabots.
“Now look you well, Friend Scotland,” said Father Hamilton, as we sat at a little table and watched the stream of quality pass, “look you well and watch particularly every gentleman that passes to the right, and when you see one you know tell me quickly.”
He had dropped his Roman manner as if in too sober a mood to act.
“Is it a game?” I asked. “Who can I ken in the town of Versailles that never saw me here before?”
“Never mind,” said he, “do as I tell you. A sharp eye, and-”
“Why,” I cried, “there’s a man I have seen before!”
“Where? where?” said Father Hamilton, with the utmost interest lighting his countenance.
“Yonder, to the left of the man with the velvet breeches. He will pass us in a minute or two.”
The person I meant would have been kenspeckle in any company by the splendour of his clothing, but beyond his clothing there was a haughtiness in his carriage that singled him out even among the fashionables of Versailles, who were themselves obviously interested in his personality, to judge by the looks that they gave him as closely as breeding permitted. He came sauntering along the pavement swinging a cane by its tassel, his chin in the air, his eyes anywhere but on the crowds that parted to give him room. As he came closer I saw it was a handsome face enough that thus was cocked in haughtiness to the heavens, not unlike Clancarty’s in that it showed the same signs of dissipation, yet with more of native nobility in it than was in the good enough countenance of the French-Irish nobleman. Where had I seen that face before?
It must have been in Scotland; it must have been when I was a boy; it was never in the Mearns. This was a hat with a Dettingen cock; when I saw that forehead last it was under a Highland bonnet.
A Highland bonnet – why! yes, and five thousand Highland bonnets were in its company – whom had I here but Prince Charles Edward!
The recognition set my heart dirling in my breast, for there was enough of the rebel in me to feel a romantic glow at seeing him who set Scotland in a blaze, and was now the stuff of songs our women sang in milking folds among the hills; that heads had fallen for, and the Hebrides had been searched for in vain for weary seasons. The man was never a hero of mine so long as I had the cooling influence of my father to tell me how lamentable for Scotland had been his success had God permitted the same, yet I was proud to-day to see him.
“Is it he?” asked the priest, dividing his attention between me and the approaching nobleman.
“It’s no other,” said I. “I would know Prince Charles in ten thousand, though I saw him but the once in a rabble of caterans coming up the Gallow-gate of Glasgow.”
“Ah,” said the priest, with a curious sighing sound. “They said he passed here at the hour. And that’s our gentleman, is it? I expected he would have been – would have been different.” When the Prince was opposite the café where we sat he let his glance come to earth, and it fell upon myself. His aspect changed; there was something of recognition in it; though he never slackened his pace and was gazing the next moment down the vista of the street, I knew that his glance had taken me in from head to heel, and that I was still the object of his thoughts.
“You see! you see!” cried the priest, “I was right, and he knew the Greig. Why, lad, shalt have an Easter egg for this – the best horologe in Versailles upon Monday morning.”
“Why, how could he know me?” I asked. “It is an impossibility, for when he and I were in the same street last he rode a horse high above an army and I was only a raw laddie standing at a close-mouth in Duff’s Land in the Gallowgate.”
But all the same I felt the priest was right, and that there was some sort of recognition in the Prince’s glance at me in passing.
Father Hamilton poured himself a generous glass and drank thirstily.
“La! la! la!” said he, resuming his customary manner of address. “I daresay his Royal Highness has never clapt eyes on thy croque-mori countenance before, but he has seen its like – ay, and had a regard for it, too! Thine Uncle Andrew has done the thing for thee again; the mole, the hair, the face, the shoes – sure they advertise the Greig as by a drum tuck! and Charles Edward knew thy uncle pretty well so I supposed he would know thee. And this is my gentleman, is it? Well, well! No, not at all well; mighty ill indeed. Not the sort of fellow I had looked for at all. Seems a harmless man enough, and has tossed many a goblet in the way of company. If he had been a sour whey-face now – ”
