WHEREIN A SITUATION OFFERS AND I ENGAGE TO GO TRAVELLING WITH THE PRIEST
A week passed with no further incident particularly affecting this history. With my reduced and antique mentor I studied la belle langue, sedulous by day, at night pacing the front of the sea, giving words to its passion as it broke angry on the bar or thundered on the beach—the sea that still haunts me and invites, whose absence makes often lonely the moorland country where is my home, where are my people's graves. It called me then, in the dripping weather of those nights in France—it called me temptingly to try again my Shoes of Fortune (as now I named them to myself), and learn whereto they might lead.
But in truth I was now a prisoner to that inviting sea. The last English vessel had gone; the Channel was a moat about my native isle, and I was a tee'd ball with a passport that was no more and no less than a warder's warrant in my pouch. It had come to me under cover of Thurot two days after Miss Walkinshaw's promise; it commanded tous les gouverneurs et tous les lieutenants-généraux de nos provinces et de nos armées, gouverneurs particuliers et commandants de nos villes, places et troupes to permit and pass the Sieur Greig anywhere in the country, sans lui donner aucun empêchement, and was signed for the king by the Duc de Choiseuil.
I went round to make my devoirs to the lady to whom I owed the favour, and this time I was alone.
“Where's your shoon, laddie?” said she at the first go-off. “Losh! do ye no' ken that they're the very makin' o' ye? If it hadna been for them Clementina Walkinshaw wad maybe never hae lookit the gait ye were on. Ye'll be to put them on again!” She thrust forth a bottine like a doll's for size and trod upon my toes, laughing the while with her curious suggestion of unpractised merriment at my first solemn acceptance of her humour as earnest.
“Am I never to get quit o' thae shoes?” I cried; “the very deil maun be in them.”
“It was the very deil,” said she, “was in them when it was your Uncle Andrew.” And she stopped and sighed. “O Andy Greig, Andy Greig! had I been a wise woman and ta'en a guid-hearted though throughither Mearns man's advice—toots! laddie, I micht be a rudas auld wife by my preachin'. Oh, gie's a sang, or I'll dee.”
And then she flew to the spinet (a handsome instrument singularly out of keeping with the rest of the plenishing in that odd lodging in the Rue de la Boucherie of Dunkerque), and touched a prelude and broke into an air.
To-day they call that woman lost and wicked; I have seen it said in
books: God's pity on her! she was not bad; she was the very football of
fate, and a heart of the yellow gold. If I was warlock or otherwise had
charms, I would put back the dial two score years and wrench her from
her chains.
O waly, waly up the bank,
O waly, waly doon the brae.
And waly, waly yon burn-side,
Where I and my love wont to gae.
I leaned my back unto an aik,
I thocht it was a trusty tree,
But first it bowed and syne it brak,
Sae my true love did lichtly me.
They have their own sorrow even in script those ballad words of an exile like herself, but to hear Miss Walkinshaw sing them was one of the saddest things I can recall in a lifetime that has known many sorrows. And still, though sad, not wanting in a sort of brave defiance of calumny, a hope, and an unchanging affection. She had a voice as sweet as a bird in the thicket at home; she had an eye full and melting; her lips, at the sentiment, sometimes faintly broke.