The husband, with an eye of warm alacrity and a welcome manner that should have made his fortune in some livelier hostel than the dreary inn of Flanders Moss, regarded the stranger with compassion. The wife, an acrid peevish body, ill-content to be roused from bed at such an hour, plucked at the strings of her night-cap, loosened and fastened them half a dozen times as if they bridled a wroth that choked her, and looked with candid disapproval on the customer standing in the kitchen with the rain running from his wrap-rascal coat on the fresh-caumed flagstones of her floor.“H’m!” she coughed; “it’s no’ a time o’ the year when we’re lookin’ for many visitors to the Flanders Moss.”

“But still-and-on ye’re welcome,” said the husband hastily, tender of the stranger’s feelings. “I think there’s an egg or twa, Jennet, isna there? And—and the hen; or—or yon ham?”

But Jennet tied her cap more tightly down upon her ears.

“I was making for the port o’ Menteith,” explained the stranger in a breath, compassing the chamber and the characters before him at a gled’s glance, feeling himself master of them both, flinging off the wrap-rascal and throwing his bonnet on the hearth to dry. It struck the stone with a sodden slap that would have made plain the kind of night from which he had escaped, even if the ear had not more eloquently indicated that the house was in the very throat of tempest.“Ye’ll no hae pack nor powney?” said the dame sourly, with a pursed mouth, surveying the young man’s hose, the clinging knee-breeches, the stained red waistcoat, and the shabby green cutaway coat, but more intent upon the dissipation of his shaven boyish countenance, the disorder of his hair, and his reckless eye.

“Tut, tut! It’s no’ a nicht for a cadger’s dog, let alane a powney,” said the amiable host; and then, in a beseeching tone that told the nature of their partnery, “Am I richt or am I wrang, Jennet? At least there maun be an egg or twa.”

The wife scowled at her mate, and said emphatically that eggs were out of the question, and the hour was quite ridiculous.

“I’m no heedin’,” said the stranger; “I had a meal of a kind at Fintry. What I want’s a bed.”

“Ye’ll get that!” cried the landlord heartily, glad to be assured of a speedy return to his own blankets. “There’s a snug bed ben, and ye’ll hae a’ the better appetite for breakfast.”

“But what’s your security?” demanded madam, and the goodman sighed.

Her customer shrugged his shoulders, threw himself in a chair, and thrust his feet out to the fire of turf.

“God,” said he.

“Sir?” she queried.

“I said God was my security,” remarked the stranger.

“Ye couldna hae better!” cried the innkeeper, and drawing a chopin of ale for the pious gentleman, beat down by the very gust of his geniality the rising opposition of the woman’s manner.

Twenty minutes later Black Andy went to bed in the ben. He went with his boots on, for he had, in the very act of stooping to unlace them by the light of a tallow candle, seen that which led at the end to the rout of any thought of sleep. The candle, which he had placed on the floor the better to see his knots untied, threw a beam under a heavy oaken kist in the corner, and glinted on a ring of brass that oddly hung from the bottom of the box. He threw up the lid, to find no more than a pile of homespun blanketing; then turned the kist quietly on its side, to learn that the ring was on the latch of a secret bottom. He opened it: the shallow space between the false bottom and the real one seemed at first to hold no more than rags; but fumbling through them, he found a leather pouch with three-and-twenty guineas—madam’s private hoard! As he counted the money silently on the covering of the bed, the storm that held the Flanders Moss in its possession seemed for the while to hold its breath, as he did his own, so that he could hear the thud of his heart and each reluctant tick of the kitchen clock.

For an hour he lay in darkness, wide awake, with the pouch in his breast. The murmur of voices in the kitchen ceased, its light went out; the lonely inn on the edge of the moor was black, and wholly lost in the privacy of the night.

The innkeeper, easy man! turned his face to the box-bed wall in the kitchen, and counted sheep going through a dip-tank till the fleece of the last of them spread, and spread, and spread, like a magic counterpane, and fell on him at last, smothering him to sleep. It was his goodwife’s elbow. For she lay on her back, her hands hollowed behind her ears, her cap-strings loose, and listened for some other sound than the creak of the roof-cabars, the whistle of the thatch, and tempest’s all-pervading symphony. Ah! it would have been an easier night for her if she had had some chance to put her money elsewhere; it was her evil star that had surely brought this man to Flanders Moss on a Hogmanay, the very night when all honest bodies ought to be at their own fire-ends!A sound in the room where he lay brought her sitting up in bed with every sense alert. A sash squeaked: she shook her husband out of the fleece of sleep, and they jumped together to the chamber door. It opened to a gale that blew right through it from an open window: their lodger was gone!

“I kent it!” cried the woman furiously, and shrieked to realise, by a feel of the hand in the dark, that her hoard had been discovered.

“Dod, now, that’s droll!” said her husband, scratching his head. “And him had such good security!”

II.

Black Andy, with the pouch of guineas comforting the breast of him like liquor, so that he hardly missed his wrap-rascal or his bonnet that were drying by the kitchen fire, ran along the broken road for Kippen. It was like the bed of a burn, and like a rested monster rose the storm afresh from the Hieland hills. One glance he gave behind him at a step or two from the window whence he burst; so dark was the night that the inn in the womb of it was quite invisible. He looked over his shoulder for a second time, having run for a little, and saw the bobbing of a lanthorn. His amiable host was already on his track, and Kippen was plainly no place for Black Andy.With an oath he quitted the road, ran down through a clump of hazel, and launched on the rushy moss that (as the story goes) had once been a part of the sea that threshed on Stirling rock.

Like many another man, this scamp, unskilled in thievery, had no sooner escaped the urgent danger of arrest than he rued his impulsive fall to the temptation of a bag of clinking coins. He had drunk through an idle youth, and others had paid the lawing; he had diced and cheated; he had borrowed and left unpaid; he had sold bad cattle and denied his warrandice; he had lived without labour—all of which is no more different from theft than tipsyness is different from drunkenness. But hitherto he had stopped on the verge of crime denominate, and it was his mother’s only glad reflection when the thought of his follies haunted her pillow. Had the temptation of the inn-wife’s gold come to him on another night, and elsewhere, he could have turned the broad of his back on it, and mustered conquering hosts of fear and of expedience to his support; the misfortune was that it found him in a desperate hour. For a week he had been in a most jovial company with some Campsie lairds; he had spent the price of his father’s horse to the last plack royally, as if he had been a bonnet-laird himself, and New Year’s Day should have seen him back at Blaruisken with the price of the horse, or else it meant disaster. Even that consideration scarcely would have made a thief of him (as he thought now), but for the wife in the Moss of Flanders inn; she had so little deserved to be the sole possessor of such gold. A comely wife, a civil wife, a reasonably hospitable wife (as he argued with himself), might have kept her money on the doorstep, and he would have been the last to meddle with it; but this one deserved some punishment, and he was, in a fashion, Heaven’s instrument. The husband—true, he was a kindly soul (and here the instrument of Heaven found his sophistry weak a little at the knees); but Black Andy had an intuition that the hoard was secret, even from the husband, and he guessed aright the wife would never report the actual nature of her loss.

He seemed the more contemptible a thief to himself, because in one particular he had blundered like a fool. For yonder, beiking before the innkeeper’s fire, were his wrap-rascal and his bonnet—the first, at least, a clue to his identity. There was not another wrap-rascal than his own in his native parish; the very name of the coat had seemed too sinister for his mother, and the garment made him kenspeckle over half the shire. Though the folk in the inn of the Flanders Moss might never before have cast an eye on him, they had but to hang that garment on a whin-bush at their door to learn his history from scores of passers-by.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.

“Not me!” he said. “I kent ye had Grand Security.”