my nerveless fingers and drove me away from that place. It was not the gallows I thought of (though that too was sometimes in my mind), but of the frightful responsibility I had made my burden, to send a human man before his Maker without a preparation, and my bullet hole upon his brow or breast, to tell for ever through the roaring ring of all eternity that this was the work of Paul Greig. The rushes of the moor hissed me as I ran blindly through them; the tufts of heather over Whiggit Knowe caught at me to stop me; the laverock seemed to follow overhead, a sergeant of provost determined on his victim.
My feet took me, not home to the home that was mine no more, but to Earn-side, where I felt the water crying in its linn would drown the sound of the noisy laverock; and the familiar scene would blot for a space the ugly sight from my eyes. I leant at the side to lave my brow, and could scarce believe that this haggard countenance I saw look up at me from the innocent waters was the Spoiled Horn who had been reflected in Isobel’s eyes. Over and over again I wet my lips and bathed my temples; I washed my hands, and there was on the right forefinger a mark I bear to this day where the trigger guard of the pistol in the moments of my agony had cut me to the bone without my knowing it.
When my face looked less like clay and my plans were clear, I rose and went home.
My father and mother were just sitting to supper, and I joined them. They talked of a cousin to be married in Drymen at Michaelmas, of an income in the leg of our mare, of Sabbath’s sermon, of things that were as far from me as I from heaven, and I heard them as one in a dream, far-off. What I was hearing most of the time was the laverock setting the hue and cry of Paul Greig’s crime around the world and up to the Throne itself, and what I was seeing was the vacant moor, now in the dusk, and a lad’s remains awaiting their discovery. The victuals choked me as I pretended to eat; my father noticed nothing, my mother gave a glance, and a fright was in her face.
I went up to my room and searched a desk for some verses that had been gathering there in my twelve months’ degradation, and particularly for one no more than a day old with Isobel Fortune for its theme. It was all bye with that! I was bound to be glancing at some of the lines as I furiously tore them up and threw them out of the window into the bleaching-green; and oh! but the black sorrows and glooms that were there recorded seemed a mockery in the light of this my terrible experience. They went by the window, every scrap: then I felt cut off from every innocent day of my youth, the past clean gone from me for ever.
The evening worship came.
“If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost ends of the sea.”
My father, peering close at the Book through his spectacles, gave out the words as if he stood upon a pulpit, deliberate – too deliberate for Cain his son, that sat with his back to the window shading his face from a mother’s eyes. They were always on me, her eyes, throughout that last service; they searched me like a torch in a pit, and wae, wae was her face!
When we came to pray and knelt upon the floor, I felt as through my shut eyes that hers were on me even then, exceeding sad and troubled. They followed me like that when I went up, as they were to think, to my bed, and I was sitting at my window in the dark half an hour later when she came up after me. She had never done the like before since I was a child.
“Are ye bedded, Paul?” she whispered in the dark.
I could not answer her in words, but I stood to my feet and lit a candle, and she saw that I was dressed.
“What ails ye to-night?” she asked trembling. “I’m going away, mother,” I answered. “There’s something wrong?” she queried in great distress.
“There’s all that!” I confessed. “It’ll be time for you to ken about that in the morning, but I must be off this night.”
“Oh, Paul, Paul!” she cried, “I did not like to see you going out in these shoes this afternoon, and I ken’t that something ailed ye.”
“The road to hell suits one shoe as well’s another,” said I bitterly; “where the sorrow lies is that ye never saw me go out with a different heart. Mother, mother, the worst ye can guess is no’ so bad as the worst ye’ve yet to hear of your son.”
I was in a storm of roaring emotions, yet her next words startled me.
“It’s Isobel Fortune of the Kirkillstane,” she said, trying hard to smile with a wan face in the candle light.
“It was– poor dear! Am I not in torment when I think that she must know it?”
“I thought it was that that ailed ye, Paul,” said she, as if she were relieved. “Look; I got this a little ago on the bleaching-green – this scrap of paper in your write and her name upon it. Maybe I should not have read it.” And she handed me part of that ardent ballad I had torn less than an hour ago.
I held it in the flame of her candle till it was gone, our hands all trembling, and “That’s the end appointed for Paul Greig,” said I.
“Oh, Paul, Paul, it cannot be so unco’!” she cried in terror, and clutched me at the arm.
“It is – it is the worst.”
“And yet – and yet – you’re my son, Paul. Tell me.”
She looked so like a reed in the winter wind, so frail and little and shivering in my room, that I dared not tell her there and then. I said it was better that both father and she should hear my tale together, and we went into the room where already he was bedded but not asleep. He sat up staring at our entry, a night-cowl tassel dangling on his brow.
“There’s a man dead – ” I began, when he checked me with a shout.
“Stop, stop!” he cried, and put my mother in a chair. “I have heard the tale before with my brother Andy, and the end was not for women’s ears.”
“I must know, Quentin,” said his wife, blanched to the lip but determined, and then he put his arm about her waist. It seemed like a second murder to wrench those tender hearts that loved me, but the thing was bound to do.
I poured out my tale at one breath and in one sentence, and when it ended my mother was in her swound.
“Oh, Paul!” cried the poor man, his face like a clout; “black was the day she gave you birth!”
CHAPTER VII
QUENTIN GREIG LOSES A SON, AND I SET OUT WITH A HORSE AS ALL MY FORTUNE
He pushed me from the chamber as I had been a stranger intruding, and I went to the trance door and looked out at the stretching moorlands lit by an enormous moon that rose over Cathkin Braes, and an immensity of stars. For the first time in all my life I realised the heedlessness of nature in human affairs the most momentous. For the moon swung up serene beyond expression; the stars winked merrily: a late bird glid among the bushes and perched momentarily on a bough of ash to pipe briefly almost with the passion of the spring. But not the heedlessness of nature influenced me so much as the barren prospect of the world that the moon and stars revealed. There was no one out there in those deep spaces of darkness I could claim as friend or familiar. Where was I to go? What was I to do? Only the beginnings of schemes came to me – schemes of concealment and disguise, of surrender even – but the last to be dismissed as soon as it occurred to me, for how could I leave this house the bitter bequest of a memory of the gallows-tree?
Only the beginnings, I say, for every scheme ran tilt against the obvious truth that I was not only without affection or regard out there, but without as much as a crown of money to purchase the semblance of either.
