I plucked my hand away with a “Pshaw! what does it matter? If I doubled your fee you would give me the very best fortune in your wit to devise.”
The Irishman with the silver eye here jostled a merchantman, who drew his gully-knife, so that soon there was a fierce quarrel that it took all the landlord’s threats and vigour of arm to put an end ta By this time I was becoming tired of my company; now that the spae-wife had planted the seed of distress in my mind, those people were tawdry, unclean, wretched. They were all in rags, foul and smelling; their music was but noise demented. I wondered at myself there in so vicious a company. And Betty—home—love—peace—how all the tribe of them suddenly took up every corner of my mind. Oh! fool, fool, I called myself, to be thinking your half-hearted wooing of the woman had left any fondness behind it. From the beginning you were second in the field, and off the field now—a soldier of a disgraced army, has the cousin not all the chances in the world? Hell be the true friend in trouble, hell console her loneliness in a sacked burgh town; a woman’s affection is so often her reward for simple kindness that he has got her long ago at no greater cost than keeping her company in her lonely hours. And you are but the dreamer, standing off trembling and flushing like a boy when you should be boldly on her cheek, because you dare not think yourself her equal The father’s was the true word: “There’s one thing a woman will not abide, that her lover should think lightly either of himself or her.”
All that black stream of sorry thought went rushing through me as I sat with an empty jug in my hand in a room that was sounding like a market-place. With a start I wakened up to find the landlord making a buffoon’s attempt at a dance in the middle of the floor to the tune of the Jew-trump, a transparent trick to restore the good-humour of his roysterers, and the black man who had fetched the spae-wife was standing at my side surveying me closely out of the corners of his eyes. I stood to my feet and ganted with great deliberation to pretend I had been half-sleeping. He yawned too, but with such obvious pretence that I could not but laugh at him, and he smiled knowingly back.
“Well,” said he in English, “you’ll allow it’s a fair imitation, for I never heard that a put-on gant was smittal. I see that you are put about at my wife’s fortune: she’s a miracle at the business, as I said; she has some secrets of fate I would rather with her than me. But I would swear a man may sometime get the better even of fate if he has a warning of its approach.”
“I can scarcely see that by the logic of Porphyrius or Peter Hispanus with the categories, two scholars I studied at Glascow. But you are surely a queer man to be a vagabond at the petticoat-tails of a spae-wife,” said I.
“I’ve had my chance of common life, city and town, and the company of ladies with broidery and camisole and washen faces,” he answered with no hesitation, “and give me the highroad and freedom and the very brute of simplicity. I’m not of these parts. I’m not of the Highlands at all, as you may guess, though I’ve been in them and through them for many a day. I see you’re still vexed about my woman’s reading of your palm. It seems to have fitted in with some of your experience.”
I confessed her knowledge of my private affairs surprised me, and his black eyes twinkled with humour.
“I’ll explain the puzzle for just as much money as you gave her,” said he, “and leave you more satisfied at the end than she did. And there’s no black art at the bottom of my skill either.”
“Very well,” said I; “here’s your drink-money; now tell me the trick of it, for trick I suppose it is.”
He pocketed the money after a vagabond’s spit on the coin for luck, and in twenty words exposed his by-love’s device. They had just come from Inneraora two or three days before, and the tale of the Provost’s daughter in Strongara had been the talk of the town.