‘I take you all to witness—can you hear me?—I take you all to witness that I recognise as my heir and representative this gentleman, whom most of you see for the first time, the Viscount Anne de St.-Yves, my nephew of the younger line. And I take you to witness at the same time that, for very good reasons known to myself, I have discarded and disinherited this other gentleman whom you all know, the Viscount de St.-Yves. I have also to explain the unusual trouble to which I have put you all—and, since your supper was not over, I fear I may even say annoyance. It has pleased M. Alain to make some threats of disputing my will, and to pretend that there are among your number certain estimable persons who may be trusted to swear as he shall direct them. It pleases me thus to put it out of his power and to stop the mouths of his false witnesses. I am infinitely obliged by your politeness, and I have the honour to wish you all a very good evening.’
As the servants, still greatly mystified, crowded out of the sickroom door, curtseying, pulling the forelock, scraping with the foot, and so on, according to their degree, I turned and stole a look at my cousin. He had borne this crushing public rebuke without change of countenance. He stood, now, very upright, with folded arms, and looking inscrutably at the roof of the apartment. I could not refuse him at that moment the tribute of my admiration. Still more so when, the last of the domestics having filed through the doorway and left us alone with my great-uncle and the lawyer, he took one step forward towards the bed, made a dignified reverence, and addressed the man who had just condemned him to ruin.
‘My lord,’ said he, ‘you are pleased to treat me in a manner which my gratitude, and your state, equally forbid me to call in question. It will be only necessary for me to call your attention to the length of time in which I have been taught to regard myself as your heir. In that position, I judged it only loyal to permit myself a certain scale of expenditure. If I am now to be cut off with a shilling as the reward of twenty years of service, I shall be left not only a beggar, but a bankrupt.’
Whether from the fatigue of his recent exertion, or by a well-inspired ingenuity of hate, my uncle had once more closed his eyes; nor did he open them now. ‘Not with a shilling,’ he contented himself with replying; and there stole, as he said it, a sort of smile over his face, that flickered there conspicuously for the least moment of time, and then faded and left behind the old impenetrable mask of years, cunning, and fatigue. There could be no mistake: my uncle enjoyed the situation as he had enjoyed few things in the last quarter of a century. The fires of life scarce survived in that frail body; but hatred, like some immortal quality, was still erect and unabated.
Nevertheless my cousin persevered.
‘I speak at a disadvantage,’ he resumed. ‘My supplanter, with perhaps more wisdom than delicacy, remains in the room,’ and he cast a glance at me that might have withered an oak tree.
I was only too willing to withdraw, and Romaine showed as much alacrity to make way for my departure. But my uncle was not to be moved. In the same breath of a voice, and still without opening his eyes, he bade me remain.
‘It is well,’ said Alain. ‘I cannot then go on to remind you of the twenty years that have passed over our heads in England, and the services I may have rendered you in that time. It would be a position too odious. Your lordship knows me too well to suppose I could stoop to such ignominy. I must leave out all my defence—your lordship wills it so! I do not know what are my faults; I know only my punishment, and it is greater than I have the courage to face. My uncle, I implore your pity: pardon me so far; do not send me for life into a debtors’ jail—a pauper debtor.’
‘Chat et vieux,pardonnez?’ said my uncle, quoting from La Fontaine; and then, opening a pale-blue eye full on Alain, he delivered with some emphasis:
‘La jeunesse se flatte et croit tout obtenir;La vieillesse est impitoyable.’
‘La jeunesse se flatte et croit tout obtenir;La vieillesse est impitoyable.’
The blood leaped darkly into Alain’s face. He turned to Romaine and me, and his eyes flashed.
‘It is your turn now,’ he said. ‘At least it shall be prison for prison with the two viscounts.’
‘Not so, Mr. Alain, by your leave,’ said Romaine. ‘There are a few formalities to be considered first.’
But Alain was already striding towards the door.
‘Stop a moment, stop a moment!’ cried Romaine. ‘Remember your own counsel not to despise an adversary.’
Alain turned.
‘If I do not despise I hate you!’ he cried, giving a loose to his passion. ‘Be warned of that, both of you.’
‘I understand you to threaten Monsieur le Vicomte Anne,’ said the lawyer. ‘Do you know, I would not do that. I am afraid, I am very much afraid, if you were to do as you propose, you might drive me into extremes.’
‘You have made me a beggar and a bankrupt,’ said Alain. What extreme is left?’
‘I scarce like to put a name upon it in this company,’ replied Romaine. ‘But there are worse things than even bankruptcy, and worse places than a debtors’ jail.’
The words were so significantly said that there went a visible thrill through Alain; sudden as a sword-stroke, he fell pale again.
‘I do not understand you,’ said he.
‘O yes, you do,’ returned Romaine. ‘I believe you understand me very well. You must not suppose that all this time, while you were so very busy, others were entirely idle. You must not fancy, because I am an Englishman, that I have not the intelligence to pursue an inquiry. Great as is my regard for the honour of your house, M. Alain de St.-Yves, if I hear of you moving directly or indirectly in this matter, I shall do my duty, let it cost what it will: that is, I shall communicate the real name of the Buonapartist spy who signs his lettersRue Grégoire de Tours.’
I confess my heart was already almost altogether on the side of my insulted and unhappy cousin; and if it had not been before, it must have been so now, so horrid was the shock with which he heard his infamy exposed. Speech was denied him; he carried his hand to his neckcloth; he staggered; I thought he must have fallen. I ran to help him, and at that he revived, recoiled before me, and stood there with arms stretched forth as if to preserve himself from the outrage of my touch.
‘Hands off!’ he somehow managed to articulate.
‘You will now, I hope,’ pursued the lawyer, without any change of voice, ‘understand the position in which you are placed, and how delicately it behoves you to conduct yourself. Your arrest hangs, if I may so express myself, by a hair; and as you will be under the perpetual vigilance of myself and my agents, you must look to it narrowly that you walk straight. Upon the least dubiety, I will take action.’ He snuffed, looking critically at the tortured man. ‘And now let me remind you that your chaise is at the door. This interview is agitating to his lordship—it cannot be agreeable for you—and I suggest that it need not be further drawn out. It does not enter into the views of your uncle, the Count, that you should again sleep under this roof.’
As Alain turned and passed without a word or a sign from the apartment, I instantly followed. I suppose I must be at bottom possessed of some humanity; at least, this accumulated torture, this slow butchery of a man as by quarters of rock, had wholly changed my sympathies. At that moment I loathed both my uncle and the lawyer for their coldblooded cruelty.
Leaning over the banisters, I was but in time to hear his hasty footsteps in that hall that had been crowded with servants to honour his coming, and was now left empty against his friendless departure. A moment later, and the echoes rang, and the air whistled in my ears, as he slammed the door on his departing footsteps. The fury of the concussion gave me (had one been still wanted) a measure of the turmoil of his passions. In a sense, I felt with him; I felt how he would have gloried to slam that door on my uncle, the lawyer, myself, and the whole crowd of those who had been witnesses to his humiliation.
No sooner was the house clear of my cousin than I began to reckon up, ruefully enough, the probable results of what had passed. Here were a number of pots broken, and it looked to me as if I should have to pay for all! Here had been this proud, mad beast goaded and baited both publicly and privately, till he could neither hear nor see nor reason; whereupon the gate had been set open, and he had been left free to go and contrive whatever vengeance he might find possible. I could not help thinking it was a pity that, whenever I myself was inclined to be upon my good behaviour, some friends of mine should always determine to play a piece of heroics and cast me for the hero—or the victim—which is very much the same. The first duty of heroics is to be of your own choosing. When they are not that, they are nothing. And I assure you, as I walked back to my own room, I was in no very complaisant humour: thought my uncle and Mr. Romaine to have played knuckle-bones with my life and prospects; cursed them for it roundly; had no wish more urgent than to avoid the pair of them; and was quite knocked out of time, as they say in the ring, to find myself confronted with the lawyer.
He stood on my hearthrug, leaning on the chimney-piece, with a gloomy, thoughtful brow, as I was pleased to see, and not in the least as though he were vain of the late proceedings.
‘Well?’ said I. ‘You have done it now!’
‘Is he gone?’ he asked.
‘He is gone,’ said I. ‘We shall have the devil to pay with him when he comes back.’
‘You are right,’ said the lawyer, ‘and very little to pay him with but flams and fabrications, like to-night’s.’
‘To-night’s?’ I repeated.
‘Ay, to-night’s!’ said he.
‘To-night’swhat?’ I cried.
‘To-night’s flams and fabrications.’
‘God be good to me, sir,’ said I, ‘have I something more to admire in your conduct than everIhad suspected? You cannot think how you interest me! That it was severe, I knew; I had already chuckled over that. But that it should be false also! In what sense, dear sir?’
I believe I was extremely offensive as I put the question, but the lawyer paid no heed.
‘False in all senses of the word,’ he replied seriously. ‘False in the sense that they were not true, and false in the sense that they were not real; false in the sense that I boasted, and in the sense that I lied. How can I arrest him? Your uncle burned the papers! I told you so—but doubtless you have forgotten—the day I first saw you in Edinburgh Castle. It was an act of generosity; I have seen many of these acts, and always regretted—always regretted! “That shall be his inheritance,” he said, as the papers burned; he did not mean that it should have proved so rich a one. How rich, time will tell.’
‘I beg your pardon a hundred thousand times, my dear sir, but it strikes me you have the impudence—in the circumstances, I may call it the indecency—to appear cast down?’
‘It is true,’ said he: ‘I am. I am cast down. I am literally cast down. I feel myself quite helpless against your cousin.’
‘Now, really!’ I asked. ‘Is this serious? And is it perhaps the reason why you have gorged the poor devil with every species of insult? and why you took such surprising pains to supply me with what I had so little need of—another enemy? That you were helpless against them? “Here is my last missile,” say you; “my ammunition is quite exhausted: just wait till I get the last in—it will irritate, it cannot hurt him. There—you see!—he is furious now, and I am quite helpless. One more prod, another kick: now he is a mere lunatic! Stand behind me; I am quite helpless!” Mr. Romaine, I am asking myself as to the background or motive of this singular jest, and whether the name of it should not be called treachery?’
‘I can scarce wonder,’ said he. ‘In truth it has been a singular business, and we are very fortunate to be out of it so well. Yet it was not treachery: no, no, Mr. Anne, it was not treachery; and if you will do me the favour to listen to me for the inside of a minute, I shall demonstrate the same to you beyond cavil.’ He seemed to wake up to his ordinary briskness. ‘You see the point?’ he began. ‘He had not yet read the newspaper, but who could tell when he might? He might have had that damned journal in his pocket, and how should we know? We were—I may say, we are—at the mercy of the merest twopenny accident.’
‘Why, true,’ said I: ‘I had not thought of that.’
‘I warrant you,’ cried Romaine, ‘you had supposed it was nothing to be the hero of an interesting notice in the journals! You had supposed, as like as not, it was a form of secrecy! But not so in the least. A part of England is already buzzing with the name of Champdivers; a day or two more and the mail will have carried it everywhere: so wonderful a machine is this of ours for disseminating intelligence! Think of it! When my father was born—but that is another story. To return: we had here the elements of such a combustion as I dread to think of—your cousin and the journal. Let him but glance an eye upon that column of print, and where were we? It is easy to ask; not so easy to answer, my young friend. And let me tell you, this sheet is the Viscount’s usual reading. It is my conviction he had it in his pocket.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ said I. ‘I have been unjust. I did not appreciate my danger.’
‘I think you never do,’ said he.
‘But yet surely that public scene—’ I began.
‘It was madness. I quite agree with you,’ Mr. Romaine interrupted. ‘But it was your uncle’s orders, Mr. Anne, and what could I do? Tell him you were the murderer of Goguelat? I think not.’
‘No, sure!’ said I. ‘That would but have been to make the trouble thicker. We were certainly in a very ill posture.’
‘You do not yet appreciate how grave it was,’ he replied. ‘It was necessary for you that your cousin should go, and go at once. You yourself had to leave to-night under cover of darkness, and how could you have done that with the Viscount in the next room? He must go, then; he must leave without delay. And that was the difficulty.’
‘Pardon me, Mr. Romaine, but could not my uncle have bidden him go?’ I asked.
‘Why, I see I must tell you that this is not so simple as it sounds,’ he replied. ‘You say this is your uncle’s house, and so it is. But to all effects and purposes it is your cousin’s also. He has rooms here; has had them coming on for thirty years now, and they are filled with a prodigious accumulation of trash—stays, I dare say, and powder-puffs, and such effeminate idiocy—to which none could dispute his title, even suppose any one wanted to. We had a perfect right to bid him go, and he had a perfect right to reply, “Yes, I will go, but not without my stays and cravats. I must first get together the nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine chestsfull of insufferable rubbish, that I have spent the last thirty years collecting—and may very well spend the next thirty hours a-packing of.” And what should we have said to that?’
‘By way of repartee?’ I asked. ‘Two tall footmen and a pair of crabtree cudgels, I suggest.’
‘The Lord deliver me from the wisdom of laymen!’ cried Romaine. ‘Put myself in the wrong at the beginning of a lawsuit? No, indeed! There was but one thing to do, and I did it, and burned my last cartridge in the doing of it. I stunned him. And it gave us three hours, by which we should make haste to profit; for if there is one thing sure, it is that he will be up to time again to-morrow in the morning.’
‘Well,’ said I, ‘I own myself an idiot. Well do they say,an old soldier,an old innocent! For I guessed nothing of all this.’
‘And, guessing it, have you the same objections to leave England?’ he inquired.
‘The same,’ said I.
‘It is indispensable,’ he objected.
‘And it cannot be,’ I replied. ‘Reason has nothing to say in the matter; and I must not let you squander any of yours. It will be enough to tell you this is an affair of the heart.’
‘Is it even so?’ quoth Romaine, nodding his head. ‘And I might have been sure of it. Place them in a hospital, put them in a jail in yellow overalls, do what you will, young Jessamy finds young Jenny. O, have it your own way; I am too old a hand to argue with young gentlemen who choose to fancy themselves in love; I have too much experience, thank you. Only, be sure that you appreciate what you risk: the prison, the dock, the gallows, and the halter—terribly vulgar circumstances, my young friend; grim, sordid, earnest; no poetry in that!’
‘And there I am warned,’ I returned gaily. ‘No man could be warned more finely or with a greater eloquence. And I am of the same opinion still. Until I have again seen that lady, nothing shall induce me to quit Great Britain. I have besides—’
And here I came to a full stop. It was upon my tongue to have told him the story of the drovers, but at the first word of it my voice died in my throat. There might be a limit to the lawyer’s toleration, I reflected. I had not been so long in Britain altogether; for the most part of that time I had been by the heels in limbo in Edinburgh Castle; and already I had confessed to killing one man with a pair of scissors; and now I was to go on and plead guilty to having settled another with a holly stick! A wave of discretion went over me as cold and as deep as the sea.
‘In short, sir, this is a matter of feeling,’ I concluded, ‘and nothing will prevent my going to Edinburgh.’
If I had fired a pistol in his ear he could not have been more startled.
‘To Edinburgh?’ he repeated. ‘Edinburgh? where the very paving-stones know you!’
‘Then is the murder out!’ said I. ‘But, Mr. Romaine, is there not sometimes safety in boldness? Is it not a common-place of strategy to get where the enemy least expects you? And where would he expect me less?’
‘Faith, there is something in that, too!’ cried the lawyer. ‘Ay, certainly, a great deal in that. All the witnesses drowned but one, and he safe in prison; you yourself changed beyond recognition—let us hope—and walking the streets of the very town you have illustrated by your—well, your eccentricity! It is not badly combined, indeed!’
‘You approve it, then?’ said I.
‘O, approve!’ said he; ‘there is no question of approval. There is only one course which I could approve, and that were to escape to France instanter.’
‘You do not wholly disapprove, at least?’ I substituted.
‘Not wholly; and it would not matter if I did,’ he replied. ‘Go your own way; you are beyond argument. And I am not sure that you will run more danger by that course than by any other. Give the servants time to get to bed and fall asleep, then take a country cross-road and walk, as the rhyme has it, like blazes all night. In the morning take a chaise or take the mail at pleasure, and continue your journey with all the decorum and reserve of which you shall be found capable.’
‘I am taking the picture in,’ I said. ‘Give me time. ’Tis thetout ensembleI must see: the whole as opposed to the details.’
‘Mountebank!’ he murmured.
‘Yes, I have it now; and I see myself with a servant, and that servant is Rowley,’ said I.
‘So as to have one more link with your uncle?’ suggested the lawyer. ‘Very judicious!’
‘And, pardon me, but that is what it is,’ I exclaimed. ‘Judicious is the word. I am not making a deception fit to last for thirty years; I do not found a palace in the living granite for the night. This is a shelter tent—a flying picture—seen, admired, and gone again in the wink of an eye. What is wanted, in short, is atrompe-l’œilthat shall be good enough for twelve hours at an inn: is it not so?’
‘It is, and the objection holds. Rowley is but another danger,’ said Romaine.
‘Rowley,’ said I, ‘will pass as a servant from a distance—as a creature seen poised on the dicky of a bowling chaise. He will pass at hand as a smart, civil fellow one meets in the inn corridor, and looks back at, and asks, and is told, “Gentleman’s servant in Number 4.” He will pass, in fact, all round, except with his personal friends! My dear sir, pray what do you expect? Of course if we meet my cousin, or if we meet anybody who took part in the judicious exhibition of this evening, we are lost; and who’s denying it? To every disguise, however good and safe, there is always the weak point; you must always take (let us say—and to take a simile from your own waistcoat pocket) a snuff box-full of risk. You’ll get it just as small with Rowley as with anybody else. And the long and short of it is, the lad’s honest, he likes me, I trust him; he is my servant, or nobody.’
‘He might not accept,’ said Romaine.
‘I bet you a thousand pounds he does!’ cried I. ‘But no matter; all you have to do is to send him out to-night on this cross-country business, and leave the thing to me. I tell you, he will be my servant, and I tell you, he will do well.’
I had crossed the room, and was already overhauling my wardrobe as I spoke.
‘Well,’ concluded the lawyer, with a shrug, ‘one risk with another:à la guerre comme à la guerre, as you would say. Let the brat come and be useful, at least.’ And he was about to ring the bell, when his eye was caught by my researches in the wardrobe. ‘Do not fall in love with these coats, waistcoats, cravats, and other panoply and accoutrements by which you are now surrounded. You must not run the post as a dandy. It is not the fashion, even.’
‘You are pleased to be facetious, sir,’ said I; ‘and not according to knowledge. These clothes are my life, they are my disguise; and since I can take but few of them, I were a fool indeed if I selected hastily! Will you understand, once and for all, what I am seeking? To be invisible, is the first point; the second, to be invisible in a post-chaise and with a servant. Can you not perceive the delicacy of the quest? Nothing must be too coarse, nothing too fine;rien de voyant,rien qui détonne; so that I may leave everywhere the inconspicuous image of a handsome young man of a good fortune travelling in proper style, whom the landlord will forget in twelve hours—and the chambermaid perhaps remember, God bless her! with a sigh. This is the very fine art of dress.’
‘I have practised it with success for fifty years,’ said Romaine, with a chuckle. ‘A black suit and a clean shirt is my infallible recipe.’
‘You surprise me; I did not think you would be shallow!’ said I, lingering between two coats. ‘Pray, Mr. Romaine, have I your head? or did you travel post and with a smartish servant?’
‘Neither, I admit,’ said he.
‘Which change the whole problem,’ I continued. ‘I have to dress for a smartish servant and a Russia leather despatch-box.’ That brought me to a stand. I came over and looked at the box with a moment’s hesitation. ‘Yes,’ I resumed. ‘Yes, and for the despatch-box! It looks moneyed and landed; it means I have a lawyer. It is an invaluable property. But I could have wished it to hold less money. The responsibility is crushing. Should I not do more wisely to take five hundred pounds, and intrust the remainder with you, Mr. Romaine?’
‘If you are sure you will not want it,’ answered Romaine.
‘I am far from sure of that,’ cried I. ‘In the first place, as a philosopher. This is the first time I have been at the head of a large sum, and it is conceivable—who knows himself?—that I may make it fly. In the second place, as a fugitive. Who knows what I may need? The whole of it may be inadequate. But I can always write for more.’
‘You do not understand,’ he replied. ‘I break off all communication with you here and now. You must give me a power of attorney ere you start to-night, and then be done with me trenchantly until better days.’
I believe I offered some objection.
‘Think a little for once of me!’ said Romaine. ‘I must not have seen you before to-night. To-night we are to have had our only interview, and you are to have given me the power; and to-night I am to have lost sight of you again—I know not whither, you were upon business, it was none of my affairs to question you! And this, you are to remark, in the interests of your own safety much more than mine.’
‘I am not even to write to you?’ I said, a little bewildered.
‘I believe I am cutting the last strand that connects you with common sense,’ he replied. ‘But that is the plain English of it. You are not even to write; and if you did, I would not answer.’
‘A letter, however—’ I began.
‘Listen to me,’ interrupted Romaine. ‘So soon as your cousin reads the paragraph, what will he do? Put the police upon looking into my correspondence! So soon as you write to me, in short, you write to Bow Street; and if you will take my advice, you will date that letter from France.’
‘The devil!’ said I, for I began suddenly to see that this might put me out of the way of my business.
‘What is it now?’ says he.
‘There will be more to be done, then, before we can part,’ I answered.
‘I give you the whole night,’ said he. ‘So long as you are off ere daybreak, I am content.’
‘In short, Mr. Romaine,’ said I, ‘I have had so much benefit of your advice and services that I am loth to sever the connection, and would even ask a substitute. I would be obliged for a letter of introduction to one of your own cloth in Edinburgh—an old man for choice, very experienced, very respectable, and very secret. Could you favour me with such a letter?’
‘Why, no,’ said he. ‘Certainly not. I will do no such thing, indeed.’
‘It would be a great favour, sir,’ I pleaded.
‘It would be an unpardonable blunder,’ he replied. ‘What? Give you a letter of introduction? and when the police come, I suppose, I must forget the circumstance? No, indeed. Talk of it no more.’
‘You seem to be always in the right,’ said I. ‘The letter would be out of the question, I quite see that. But the lawyer’s name might very well have dropped from you in the way of conversation; having heard him mentioned, I might profit by the circumstance to introduce myself; and in this way my business would be the better done, and you not in the least compromised.’
‘What is this business?’ said Romaine.
‘I have not said that I had any,’ I replied. ‘It might arise. This is only a possibility that I must keep in view.’
‘Well,’ said he, with a gesture of the hands, ‘I mention Mr. Robbie; and let that be an end of it!—Or wait!’ he added, ‘I have it. Here is something that will serve you for an introduction, and cannot compromise me.’ And he wrote his name and the Edinburgh lawyer’s address on a piece of card and tossed it to me.
What with packing, signing papers, and partaking of an excellent cold supper in the lawyer’s room, it was past two in the morning before we were ready for the road. Romaine himself let us out of a window in a part of the house known to Rowley: it appears it served as a kind of postern to the servants’ hall, by which (when they were in the mind for a clandestine evening) they would come regularly in and out; and I remember very well the vinegar aspect of the lawyer on the receipt of this piece of information—how he pursed his lips, jutted his eyebrows, and kept repeating, ‘This must be seen to, indeed! this shall be barred to-morrow in the morning!’ In this preoccupation, I believe he took leave of me without observing it; our things were handed out; we heard the window shut behind us; and became instantly lost in a horrid intricacy of blackness and the shadow of woods.
A little wet snow kept sleepily falling, pausing, and falling again; it seemed perpetually beginning to snow and perpetually leaving off; and the darkness was intense. Time and again we walked into trees; time and again found ourselves adrift among garden borders or stuck like a ram in the thicket. Rowley had possessed himself of the matches, and he was neither to be terrified nor softened. ‘No, I will not, Mr. Anne, sir,’ he would reply. ‘You know he tell me to wait till we were over the ’ill. It’s only a little way now. Why, and I thought you was a soldier, too!’ I was at least a very glad soldier when my valet consented at last to kindle a thieves’ match. From this, we easily lit the lantern; and thenceforward, through a labyrinth of woodland paths, were conducted by its uneasy glimmer. Both booted and great-coated, with tall hats much of a shape, and laden with booty in the form of a despatch-box, a case of pistols, and two plump valises, I thought we had very much the look of a pair of brothers returning from the sack of Amersham Place.
We issued at last upon a country by-road where we might walk abreast and without precaution. It was nine miles to Aylesbury, our immediate destination; by a watch, which formed part of my new outfit, it should be about half-past three in the morning; and as we did not choose to arrive before daylight, time could not be said to press. I gave the order to march at ease.
‘Now, Rowley,’ said I, ‘so far so good. You have come, in the most obliging manner in the world, to carry these valises. The question is, what next? What are we to do at Aylesbury? or, more particularly, what are you? Thence, I go on a journey. Are you to accompany me?’
He gave a little chuckle. ‘That’s all settled already, Mr. Anne, sir,’ he replied. ‘Why, I’ve got my things here in the valise—a half a dozen shirts and what not; I’m all ready, sir: just you lead on:you’llsee.’
‘The devil you have!’ said I. ‘You made pretty sure of your welcome.’
‘If you please, sir,’ said Rowley.
He looked up at me, in the light of the lantern, with a boyish shyness and triumph that awoke my conscience. I could never let this innocent involve himself in the perils and difficulties that beset my course, without some hint of warning, which it was a matter of extreme delicacy to make plain enough and not too plain.
‘No, no,’ said I; ‘you may think you have made a choice, but it was blindfold, and you must make it over again. The Count’s service is a good one; what are you leaving it for? Are you not throwing away the substance for the shadow? No, do not answer me yet. You imagine that I am a prosperous nobleman, just declared my uncle’s heir, on the threshold of the best of good fortune, and, from the point of view of a judicious servant, a jewel of a master to serve and stick to? Well, my boy, I am nothing of the kind, nothing of the kind.’
As I said the words, I came to a full stop and held up the lantern to his face. He stood before me, brilliantly illuminated on the background of impenetrable night and falling snow, stricken to stone between his double burden like an ass between two panniers, and gaping at me like a blunderbuss. I had never seen a face so predestined to be astonished, or so susceptible of rendering the emotion of surprise; and it tempted me as an open piano tempts the musician.
‘Nothing of the sort, Rowley,’ I continued, in a churchyard voice. ‘These are appearances, petty appearances. I am in peril, homeless, hunted. I count scarce any one in England who is not my enemy. From this hour I drop my name, my title; I become nameless; my name is proscribed. My liberty, my life, hang by a hair. The destiny which you will accept, if you go forth with me, is to be tracked by spies, to hide yourself under a false name, to follow the desperate pretences and perhaps share the fate of a murderer with a price upon his head.’
His face had been hitherto beyond expectation, passing from one depth to another of tragic astonishment, and really worth paying to see; but at this it suddenly cleared. ‘Oh, I ain’t afraid!’ he said; and then, choking into laughter, ‘why, I see it from the first!’
I could have beaten him. But I had so grossly overshot the mark that I suppose it took me two good miles of road and half an hour of elocution to persuade him I had been in earnest. In the course of which I became so interested in demonstrating my present danger that I forgot all about my future safety, and not only told him the story of Goguelat, but threw in the business of the drovers as well, and ended by blurting out that I was a soldier of Napoleon’s and a prisoner of war.
This was far from my views when I began; and it is a common complaint of me that I have a long tongue. I believe it is a fault beloved by fortune. Which of you considerate fellows would have done a thing at once so foolhardy and so wise as to make a confidant of a boy in his teens, and positively smelling of the nursery? And when had I cause to repent it? There is none so apt as a boy to be the adviser of any man in difficulties such as mine. To the beginnings of virile common sense he adds the last lights of the child’s imagination; and he can fling himself into business with that superior earnestness that properly belongs to play. And Rowley was a boy made to my hand. He had a high sense of romance, and a secret cultus for all soldiers and criminals. His travelling library consisted of a chap-book life of Wallace and some sixpenny parts of the ‘Old Bailey Sessions Papers’ by Gurney the shorthand writer; and the choice depicts his character to a hair. You can imagine how his new prospects brightened on a boy of this disposition. To be the servant and companion of a fugitive, a soldier, and a murderer, rolled in one—to live by stratagems, disguises, and false names, in an atmosphere of midnight and mystery so thick that you could cut it with a knife—was really, I believe, more dear to him than his meals, though he was a great trencherman, and something of a glutton besides. For myself, as the peg by which all this romantic business hung, I was simply idolised from that moment; and he would rather have sacrificed his hand than surrendered the privilege of serving me.
We arranged the terms of our campaign, trudging amicably in the snow, which now, with the approach of morning, began to fall to purpose. I chose the name of Ramornie, I imagine from its likeness to Romaine; Rowley, from an irresistible conversion of ideas, I dubbed Gammon. His distress was laughable to witness: his own choice of an unassuming nickname had been Claude Duval! We settled our procedure at the various inns where we should alight, rehearsed our little manners like a piece of drill until it seemed impossible we should ever be taken unprepared; and in all these dispositions, you maybe sure the despatch-box was not forgotten. Who was to pick it up, who was to set it down, who was to remain beside it, who was to sleep with it—there was no contingency omitted, all was gone into with the thoroughness of a drill-sergeant on the one hand and a child with a new plaything on the other.
‘I say, wouldn’t it look queer if you and me was to come to the post-house with all this luggage?’ said Rowley.
‘I dare say,’ I replied. ‘But what else is to be done?’
‘Well, now, sir—you hear me,’ says Rowley. ‘I think it would look more natural-like if you was to come to the post-house alone, and with nothing in your ’ands—more like a gentleman, you know. And you might say that your servant and baggage was a-waiting for you up the road. I think I could manage, somehow, to make a shift with all them dratted things—leastways if you was to give me a ’and up with them at the start.’
‘And I would see you far enough before I allowed you to try, Mr. Rowley!’ I cried. ‘Why, you would be quite defenceless! A footpad that was an infant child could rob you. And I should probably come driving by to find you in a ditch with your throat cut. But there is something in your idea, for all that; and I propose we put it in execution no farther forward than the next corner of a lane.’
Accordingly, instead of continuing to aim for Aylesbury, we headed by cross-roads for some point to the northward of it, whither I might assist Rowley with the baggage, and where I might leave him to await my return in the post-chaise.
It was snowing to purpose, the country all white, and ourselves walking snowdrifts, when the first glimmer of the morning showed us an inn upon the highwayside. Some distance off, under the shelter of a corner of the road and a clump of trees, I loaded Rowley with the whole of our possessions, and watched him till he staggered in safety into the doors of theGreen Dragon, which was the sign of the house. Thence I walked briskly into Aylesbury, rejoicing in my freedom and the causeless good spirits that belong to a snowy morning; though, to be sure, long before I had arrived the snow had again ceased to fall, and the eaves of Aylesbury were smoking in the level sun. There was an accumulation of gigs and chaises in the yard, and a great bustle going forward in the coffee-room and about the doors of the inn. At these evidences of so much travel on the road I was seized with a misgiving lest it should be impossible to get horses, and I should be detained in the precarious neighbourhood of my cousin. Hungry as I was, I made my way first of all to the postmaster, where he stood—a big, athletic, horsey-looking man, blowing into a key in the corner of the yard.
On my making my modest request, he awoke from his indifference into what seemed passion.
‘A po’-shay and ’osses!’ he cried. ‘Do I look as if I ’ad a po’-shay and ’osses? Damn me, if I ’ave such a thing on the premises. I don’tmake’osses and chaises—I ’ire’em. You might be God Almighty!’ said he; and instantly, as if he had observed me for the first time, he broke off, and lowered his voice into the confidential. ‘Why, now that I see you are a gentleman,’ said he, ‘I’ll tell you what! If you like tobuy, I have the article to fit you. Second-’and shay by Lycett, of London. Latest style; good as new. Superior fittin’s, net on the roof, baggage platform, pistol ’olsters—the most com-plete and the most gen-teel turn-out I ever see! The ’ole for seventy-five pound! It’s as good as givin’ her away!’
‘Do you propose I should trundle it myself, like a hawker’s barrow?’ said I. ‘Why, my good man, if I had to stop here, anyway, I should prefer to buy a house and garden!’
‘Come and look at her!’ he cried; and, with the word, links his arm in mine and carries me to the outhouse where the chaise was on view.
It was just the sort of chaise that I had dreamed of for my purpose: eminently rich, inconspicuous, and genteel; for, though I thought the postmaster no great authority, I was bound to agree with him so far. The body was painted a dark claret, and the wheels an invisible green. The lamp and glasses were bright as silver; and the whole equipage had an air of privacy and reserve that seemed to repel inquiry and disarm suspicion. With a servant like Rowley, and a chaise like this, I felt that I could go from the Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s House amid a population of bowing ostlers. And I suppose I betrayed in my manner the degree in which the bargain tempted me.
‘Come,’ cried the postmaster—‘I’ll make it seventy, to oblige a friend!’
‘The point is: the horses,’ said I.
‘Well,’ said he, consulting his watch, ‘it’s now gone the ’alf after eight. What time do you want her at the door?’
‘Horses and all?’ said I.
‘’Osses and all!’ says he. ‘One good turn deserves another. You give me seventy pound for the shay, and I’ll ’oss it for you. I told you I didn’tmake’osses; but Icanmake ’em, to oblige a friend.’
What would you have? It was not the wisest thing in the world to buy a chaise within a dozen miles of my uncle’s house; but in this way I got my horses for the next stage. And by any other it appeared that I should have to wait. Accordingly I paid the money down—perhaps twenty pounds too much, though it was certainly a well-made and well-appointed vehicle—ordered it round in half an hour, and proceeded to refresh myself with breakfast.
The table to which I sat down occupied the recess of a bay-window, and commanded a view of the front of the inn, where I continued to be amused by the successive departures of travellers—the fussy and the offhand, the niggardly and the lavish—all exhibiting their different characters in that diagnostic moment of the farewell: some escorted to the stirrup or the chaise door by the chamberlain, the chambermaids and the waiters almost in a body, others moving off under a cloud, without human countenance. In the course of this I became interested in one for whom this ovation began to assume the proportions of a triumph; not only the under-servants, but the barmaid, the landlady, and my friend the postmaster himself, crowding about the steps to speed his departure. I was aware, at the same time, of a good deal of merriment, as though the traveller were a man of a ready wit, and not too dignified to air it in that society. I leaned forward with a lively curiosity; and the next moment I had blotted myself behind the teapot. The popular traveller had turned to wave a farewell; and behold! he was no other than my cousin Alain. It was a change of the sharpest from the angry, pallid man I had seen at Amersham Place. Ruddy to a fault, illuminated with vintages, crowned with his curls like Bacchus, he now stood before me for an instant, the perfect master of himself, smiling with airs of conscious popularity and insufferable condescension. He reminded me at once of a royal duke, or an actor turned a little elderly, and of a blatant bagman who should have been the illegitimate son of a gentleman. A moment after he was gliding noiselessly on the road to London.
I breathed again. I recognised, with heartfelt gratitude, how lucky I had been to go in by the stable-yard instead of the hostelry door, and what a fine occasion of meeting my cousin I had lost by the purchase of the claret-coloured chaise! The next moment I remembered that there was a waiter present. No doubt but he must have observed me when I crouched behind the breakfast equipage; no doubt but he must have commented on this unusual and undignified behaviour; and it was essential that I should do something to remove the impression.
‘Waiter!’ said I, ‘that was the nephew of Count Carwell that just drove off, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir: Viscount Carwell we calls him,’ he replied.
‘Ah, I thought as much,’ said I. ‘Well, well, damn all these Frenchmen, say I!’
‘You may say so indeed, sir,’ said the waiter. ‘They ain’t not to say in the same field with our ’ome-raised gentry.’
‘Nasty tempers?’ I suggested.
‘Beas’ly temper, sir, the Viscount ’ave,’ said the waiter with feeling. ‘Why, no longer agone than this morning, he was sitting breakfasting and reading in his paper. I suppose, sir, he come on some pilitical information, or it might be about ’orses, but he raps his ’and upon the table sudden and calls for curacoa. It gave me quite a turn, it did; he did it that sudden and ’ard. Now, sir, that may be manners in France, but hall I can say is, that I’m not used to it.’
‘Reading the paper, was he?’ said I. ‘What paper, eh?’
‘Here it is, sir,’ exclaimed the waiter. ‘Seems like as if he’d dropped it.’
And picking it off the floor he presented it to me.
I may say that I was quite prepared, that I already knew what to expect; but at sight of the cold print my heart stopped beating. There it was: the fulfilment of Romaine’s apprehension was before me; the paper was laid open at the capture of Clausel. I felt as if I could take a little curacoa myself, but on second thoughts called for brandy. It was badly wanted; and suddenly I observed the waiter’s eye to sparkle, as it were, with some recognition; made certain he had remarked the resemblance between me and Alain; and became aware—as by a revelation—of the fool’s part I had been playing. For I had now managed to put my identification beyond a doubt, if Alain should choose to make his inquiries at Aylesbury; and, as if that were not enough, I had added, at an expense of seventy pounds, a clue by which he might follow me through the length and breadth of England, in the shape of the claret-coloured chaise! That elegant equipage (which I began to regard as little better than a claret-coloured ante-room to the hangman’s cart) coming presently to the door, I left my breakfast in the middle and departed; posting to the north as diligently as my cousin Alain was posting to the south, and putting my trust (such as it was) in an opposite direction and equal speed.
I am not certain that I had ever really appreciated before that hour the extreme peril of the adventure on which I was embarked. The sight of my cousin, the look of his face—so handsome, so jovial at the first sight, and branded with so much malignity as you saw it on the second—with his hyperbolical curls in order, with his neckcloth tied as if for the conquests of love, setting forth (as I had no doubt in the world he was doing) to clap the Bow Street runners on my trail, and cover England with handbills, each dangerous as a loaded musket, convinced me for the first time that the affair was no less serious than death. I believe it came to a near touch whether I should not turn the horses’ heads at the next stage and make directly for the coast. But I was now in the position of a man who should have thrown his gage into the den of lions; or, better still, like one who should have quarrelled overnight under the influence of wine, and now, at daylight, in a cold winter’s morning, and humbly sober, must make good his words. It is not that I thought any the less, or any the less warmly, of Flora. But, as I smoked a grim segar that morning in a corner of the chaise, no doubt I considered, in the first place, that the letter-post had been invented, and admitted privately to myself, in the second, that it would have been highly possible to write her on a piece of paper, seal it, and send it skimming by the mail, instead of going personally into these egregious dangers, and through a country that I beheld crowded with gibbets and Bow Street officers. As for Sim and Candlish, I doubt if they crossed my mind.
At the Green Dragon Rowley was waiting on the doorsteps with the luggage, and really was bursting with unpalatable conversation.
‘Who do you think we’ve ’ad ’ere, sir?’ he began breathlessly, as the chaise drove off. ‘Red Breasts’; and he nodded his head portentously.
‘Red Breasts?’ I repeated, for I stupidly did not understand at the moment an expression I had often heard.
‘Ah!’ said he. ‘Red weskits. Runners. Bow Street runners. Two on’ em, and one was Lavender himself! I hear the other say quite plain, “Now, Mr. Lavender,ifyou’re ready.” They was breakfasting as nigh me as I am to that postboy. They’re all right; they ain’t after us. It’s a forger; and I didn’t send them off on a false scent—O no! I thought there was no use in having them over our way; so I give them “very valuable information,” Mr. Lavender said, and tipped me a tizzy for myself; and they’re off to Luton. They showed me the ’andcuffs, too—the other one did—and he clicked the dratted things on my wrist; and I tell you, I believe I nearly went off in a swound! There’s something so beastly in the feel of them! Begging your pardon, Mr. Anne,’ he added, with one of his delicious changes from the character of the confidential schoolboy into that of the trained, respectful servant.
Well, I must not be proud! I cannot say I found the subject of handcuffs to my fancy; and it was with more asperity than was needful that I reproved him for the slip about the name.
‘Yes, Mr. Ramornie,’ says he, touching his hat. ‘Begging your pardon, Mr. Ramornie. But I’ve been very piticular, sir, up to now; and you may trust me to be very piticular in the future. It were only a slip, sir.’
‘My good boy,’ said I, with the most imposing severity, ‘there must be no slips. Be so good as to remember that my life is at stake.’
I did not embrace the occasion of telling him how many I had made myself. It is my principle that an officer must never be wrong. I have seen two divisions beating their brains out for a fortnight against a worthless and quite impregnable castle in a pass: I knew we were only doing it for discipline, because the General had said so at first, and had not yet found any way out of his own words; and I highly admired his force of character, and throughout these operations thought my life exposed in a very good cause. With fools and children, which included Rowley, the necessity was even greater. I proposed to myself to be infallible; and even when he expressed some wonder at the purchase of the claret-coloured chaise, I put him promptly in his place. In our situation, I told him, everything had to be sacrificed to appearances; doubtless, in a hired chaise, we should have had more freedom, but look at the dignity! I was so positive, that I had sometimes almost convinced myself. Not for long, you may be certain! This detestable conveyance always appeared to me to be laden with Bow Street officers, and to have a placard upon the back of it publishing my name and crimes. If I had paid seventy pounds to get the thing, I should not have stuck at seven hundred to be safely rid of it.
And if the chaise was a danger, what an anxiety was the despatch-box and its golden cargo! I had never had a care but to draw my pay and spend it; I had lived happily in the regiment, as in my father’s house, fed by the great Emperor’s commissariat as by ubiquitous doves of Elijah—or, my faith! if anything went wrong with the commissariat, helping myself with the best grace in the world from the next peasant! And now I began to feel at the same time the burthen of riches and the fear of destitution. There were ten thousand pounds in the despatch-box, but I reckoned in French money, and had two hundred and fifty thousand agonies; I kept it under my hand all day, I dreamed of it at night. In the inns, I was afraid to go to dinner and afraid to go to sleep. When I walked up a hill I durst not leave the doors of the claret-coloured chaise. Sometimes I would change the disposition of the funds: there were days when I carried as much as five or six thousand pounds on my own person, and only the residue continued to voyage in the treasure-chest—days when I bulked all over like my cousin, crackled to a touch with bank paper, and had my pockets weighed to bursting-point with sovereigns. And there were other days when I wearied of the thing—or grew ashamed of it—and put all the money back where it had come from: there let it take its chance, like better people! In short, I set Rowley a poor example of consistency, and in philosophy, none at all.
Little he cared! All was one to him so long as he was amused, and I never knew any one amused more easily. He was thrillingly interested in life, travel, and his own melodramatic position. All day he would be looking from the chaise windows with ebullitions of gratified curiosity, that were sometimes justified and sometimes not, and that (taken altogether) it occasionally wearied me to be obliged to share. I can look at horses, and I can look at trees too, although not fond of it. But why should I look at a lame horse, or a tree that was like the letter Y? What exhilaration could I feel in viewing a cottage that was the same colour as ‘the second from the miller’s’ in some place where I had never been, and of which I had not previously heard? I am ashamed to complain, but there were moments when my juvenile and confidential friend weighed heavy on my hands. His cackle was indeed almost continuous, but it was never unamiable. He showed an amiable curiosity when he was asking questions; an amiable guilelessness when he was conferring information. And both he did largely. I am in a position to write the biographies of Mr. Rowley, Mr. Rowley’s father and mother, his Aunt Eliza, and the miller’s dog; and nothing but pity for the reader, and some misgivings as to the law of copyright, prevail on me to withhold them.
A general design to mould himself upon my example became early apparent, and I had not the heart to check it. He began to mimic my carriage; he acquired, with servile accuracy, a little manner I had of shrugging the shoulders; and I may say it was by observing it in him that I first discovered it in myself. One day it came out by chance that I was of the Catholic religion. He became plunged in thought, at which I was gently glad. Then suddenly—
‘Odd-rabbit it! I’ll be Catholic too!’ he broke out. ‘You must teach me it, Mr. Anne—I mean, Ramornie.’
I dissuaded him: alleging that he would find me very imperfectly informed as to the grounds and doctrines of the Church, and that, after all, in the matter of religions, it was a very poor idea to change. ‘Of course, my Church is the best,’ said I; ‘but that is not the reason why I belong to it: I belong to it because it was the faith of my house. I wish to take my chances with my own people, and so should you. If it is a question of going to hell, go to hell like a gentleman with your ancestors.’
‘Well, it wasn’t that,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know that I was exactly thinking of hell. Then there’s the inquisition, too. That’s rather a cawker, you know.’
‘And I don’t believe you were thinking of anything in the world,’ said I—which put a period to his respectable conversion.
He consoled himself by playing for awhile on a cheap flageolet, which was one of his diversions, and to which I owed many intervals of peace. When he first produced it, in the joints, from his pocket, he had the duplicity to ask me if I played upon it. I answered, no; and he put the instrument away with a sigh and the remark that he had thought I might. For some while he resisted the unspeakable temptation, his fingers visibly itching and twittering about his pocket, even his interest in the landscape and in sporadic anecdote entirely lost. Presently the pipe was in his hands again; he fitted, unfitted, refitted, and played upon it in dumb show for some time.
‘I play it myself a little,’ says he.
‘Do you?’ said I, and yawned.
And then he broke down.
‘Mr. Ramornie, if you please, would it disturb you, sir, if I was to play a chune?’ he pleaded. And from that hour, the tootling of the flageolet cheered our way.
He was particularly keen on the details of battles, single combats, incidents of scouting parties, and the like. These he would make haste to cap with some of the exploits of Wallace, the only hero with whom he had the least acquaintance. His enthusiasm was genuine and pretty. When he learned we were going to Scotland, ‘Well, then,’ he broke out, ‘I’ll see where Wallace lived!’ And presently after, he fell to moralising. ‘It’s a strange thing, sir,’ he began, ‘that I seem somehow to have always the wrong sow by the ear. I’m English after all, and I glory in it. My eye! don’t I, though! Let some of your Frenchies come over here to invade, and you’ll see whether or not! Oh, yes, I’m English to the backbone, I am. And yet look at me! I got hold of this ’ere William Wallace and took to him right off; I never heard of such a man before! And then you came along, and I took to you. And both the two of you were my born enemies! I—I beg your pardon, Mr. Ramornie, but would you mind it very much if you didn’t go for to do anything against England’—he brought the word out suddenly, like something hot—‘when I was along of you?’
I was more affected than I can tell.
‘Rowley,’ I said, ‘you need have no fear. By how much I love my own honour, by so much I will take care to protect yours. We are but fraternising at the outposts, as soldiers do. When the bugle calls, my boy, we must face each other, one for England, one for France, and may God defend the right!’
So I spoke at the moment; but for all my brave airs, the boy had wounded me in a vital quarter. His words continued to ring in my hearing. There was no remission all day of my remorseful thoughts; and that night (which we lay at Lichfield, I believe) there was no sleep for me in my bed. I put out the candle and lay down with a good resolution; and in a moment all was light about me like a theatre, and I saw myself upon the stage of it playing ignoble parts. I remembered France and my Emperor, now depending on the arbitrament of war, bent down, fighting on their knees and with their teeth against so many and such various assailants. And I burned with shame to be here in England, cherishing an English fortune, pursuing an English mistress, and not there, to handle a musket in my native fields, and to manure them with my body if I fell. I remembered that I belonged to France. All my fathers had fought for her, and some had died; the voice in my throat, the sight of my eyes, the tears that now sprang there, the whole man of me, was fashioned of French earth and born of a French mother; I had been tended and caressed by a succession of the daughters of France, the fairest, the most ill-starred; and I had fought and conquered shoulder to shoulder with her sons. A soldier, a noble, of the proudest and bravest race in Europe, it had been left to the prattle of a hobbledehoy lackey in an English chaise to recall me to the consciousness of duty.
When I saw how it was I did not lose time in indecision. The old classical conflict of love and honour being once fairly before me, it did not cost me a thought. I was a Saint-Yves de Kéroual; and I decided to strike off on the morrow for Wakefield and Burchell Fenn, and embark, as soon as it should be morally possible, for the succour of my downtrodden fatherland and my beleaguered Emperor. Pursuant on this resolve, I leaped from bed, made a light, and as the watchman was crying half-past two in the dark streets of Lichfield, sat down to pen a letter of farewell to Flora. And then—whether it was the sudden chill of the night, whether it came by association of ideas from the remembrance of Swanston Cottage I know not, but there appeared before me—to the barking of sheep-dogs—a couple of snuffy and shambling figures, each wrapped in a plaid, each armed with a rude staff; and I was immediately bowed down to have forgotten them so long, and of late to have thought of them so cavalierly.
Sure enough there was my errand! As a private person I was neither French nor English; I was something else first: a loyal gentleman, an honest man. Sim and Candlish must not be left to pay the penalty of my unfortunate blow. They held my honour tacitly pledged to succour them; and it is a sort of stoical refinement entirely foreign to my nature to set the political obligation above the personal and private. If France fell in the interval for the lack of Anne de St.-Yves, fall she must! But I was both surprised and humiliated to have had so plain a duty bound upon me for so long—and for so long to have neglected and forgotten it. I think any brave man will understand me when I say that I went to bed and to sleep with a conscience very much relieved, and woke again in the morning with a light heart. The very danger of the enterprise reassured me: to save Sim and Candlish (suppose the worst to come to the worst) it would be necessary for me to declare myself in a court of justice, with consequences which I did not dare to dwell upon; it could never be said that I had chosen the cheap and the easy—only that in a very perplexing competition of duties I had risked my life for the most immediate.
We resumed the journey with more diligence: thenceforward posted day and night; did not halt beyond what was necessary for meals; and the postillions were excited by gratuities, after the habit of my cousin Alain. For twopence I could have gone farther and taken four horses; so extreme was my haste, running as I was before the terrors of an awakened conscience. But I feared to be conspicuous. Even as it was, we attracted only too much attention, with our pair and that white elephant, the seventy-pounds-worth of claret-coloured chaise.
Meanwhile I was ashamed to look Rowley in the face. The young shaver had contrived to put me wholly in the wrong; he had cost me a night’s rest and a severe and healthful humiliation; and I was grateful and embarrassed in his society. This would never do; it was contrary to all my ideas of discipline; if the officer has to blush before the private, or the master before the servant, nothing is left to hope for but discharge or death. I hit upon the idea of teaching him French; and accordingly, from Lichfield, I became the distracted master, and he the scholar—how shall I say? indefatigable, but uninspired. His interest never flagged. He would hear the same word twenty times with profound refreshment, mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it again with magical celerity. Say it happened to bestirrup. ‘No, I don’t seem to remember that word, Mr. Anne,’ he would say: ‘it don’t seem to stick to me, that word don’t.’ And then, when I had told it him again, ‘Etrier!’ he would cry. ‘To be sure! I had it on the tip of my tongue.Eterier!’ (going wrong already, as if by a fatal instinct). ‘What will I remember it by, now? Why,interior, to be sure! I’ll remember it by its being something that ain’t in the interior of a horse.’ And when next I had occasion to ask him the French for stirrup, it was a toss-up whether he had forgotten all about it, or gave meexteriorfor an answer. He was never a hair discouraged. He seemed to consider that he was covering the ground at a normal rate. He came up smiling day after day. ‘Now, sir, shall we do our French?’ he would say; and I would put questions, and elicit copious commentary and explanation, but never the shadow of an answer. My hands fell to my sides; I could have wept to hear him. When I reflected that he had as yet learned nothing, and what a vast deal more there was for him to learn, the period of these lessons seemed to unroll before me vast as eternity, and I saw myself a teacher of a hundred, and Rowley a pupil of ninety, still hammering on the rudiments! The wretched boy, I should say, was quite unspoiled by the inevitable familiarities of the journey. He turned out at each stage the pink of serving-lads, deft, civil, prompt, attentive, touching his hat like an automaton, raising the status of Mr. Ramornie in the eyes of all the inn by his smiling service, and seeming capable of anything in the world but the one thing I had chosen—learning French!