Thinking thus—not any penitent in him, but the poltroon that is in all of us at the thought of discovery by the world of what we really are—the woman’s money coldly weighed upon his bosom like a divot. By God! a rotten bargain had he made—to swap the easy mind of innocence for three days’ drinking with numskull bonnet-lairds in a Campsie tavern.
But the thing was done, with no remedy; there was nothing for it but to tramp home and meet his obligation to his father.
So busily did his mind engage with these considerations that the increase of the tempest for a little never touched his comprehension. He came to himself with a start at a stumble in a hag whose water almost reached his knees, and realised that he was ignorant of the airt he moved to, and that the passion of the night was like to shake the world in tatters. The very moss below him seemed to quiver like a bog; no rush, no heather shrub, but had its shrieking share in the cacophony of that unco hour upon the curdled spaces of the ancient sea. Black Andy put out his cold-starved hand before his face, and peered for it in vain; it might have been a hand of ebony.
For hours he laboured through that windy desert, airting, as he judged by the wind, for the north, as far away as possible from the inn of his misdoing, and weariness seemed to turn his blood to spring-well water, and his flesh to wool, so that the earthy cushion of the hags in which he sometimes stumbled tempted him to lie and sleep. The last sheuch would have done his business if he had not, sitting on its edge, beheld a glimmer of light from a window. He dragged with an effort towards it, climbed a dry-stone dyke, and felt with his hands along the back of some dwelling which he took for a shepherd’s hut, until he came upon the door. Breathlessly he leaned his shoulder to it and loudly rapped.
“First-foot!” he heard a voice exclaim, and remembered it was the New Year’s Day as the bolt shot back and he fell in the arms—of the innkeeper!
“Ye’re back, my man!” cried the innkeeper’s wife, with a face as white as sleet. “It’ll be to pay your lodging?”
“Tut, tut! never mind the lawin’. It’s the New Year’s Day, and here’s your dram,” said the genial landlord. “But, man, yon was a bonny prank to play on us! We thought ye were awa’ wi’ the wife’s best blankets.”
“But a lodgin’s aye a lodgin’,” said the wife nervously; and Andy laughed, knowing her perturbation.
“Here’s the lawin’,” he exclaimed, and banged her pouch of guineas in her hand. “Ye’ll can count it later, and I’m awa’ to my bed again. Were ye really feared I was gaein’ to cheat ye?”
It was the innkeeper who answered; his wife was off with her hoardings.