St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England by Stevenson (books for new readers TXT) 📕

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 be stirrup.  ‘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 me exterior for 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!

CHAPTER XXIII—THE ADVENTURE OF THE RUNAWAY COUPLE

The country had for some time back been changing in character.  By a thousand indications I could judge that I was again drawing near to Scotland.  I saw it written in the face of the hills, in the growth of the trees, and in the glint of the waterbrooks that kept the high-road company.  It might have occurred to me, also, that I was, at the same time, approaching a place of some fame in Britain—Gretna Green.  Over these same leagues of road—which Rowley and I now traversed in the claret-coloured chaise, to the note of the flageolet and the French lesson—how many pairs of lovers had gone bowling northwards to the music of sixteen scampering horseshoes; and how many irate persons, parents, uncles, guardians, evicted rivals, had come tearing after, clapping the frequent red face to the chaise-window, lavishly shedding their gold about the post-houses, sedulously loading and re-loading, as they went, their avenging pistols!  But I doubt if I had thought of it at all, before a wayside hazard swept me into the thick of an adventure of this nature; and I found myself playing providence with other people’s lives, to my own admiration at the moment—and subsequently to my own brief but passionate regret.

At rather an ugly corner of an uphill reach I came on the wreck of a chaise lying on one side in the ditch, a man and a woman in animated discourse in the middle of the road, and the two postillions, each with his pair of horses, looking on and laughing from the saddle.

‘Morning breezes! here’s a smash!’ cried Rowley, pocketing his flageolet in the middle of the Tight Little Island.

I was perhaps more conscious of the moral smash than the physical—more alive to broken hearts than to broken chaises; for, as plain as the sun at morning, there was a screw loose in this runaway match.  It is always a bad sign when the lower classes laugh: their taste in humour is both poor and sinister; and for a man, running the posts with four horses, presumably with open pockets, and in the company of the most entrancing little creature conceivable, to have come down so far as to be laughed at by his own postillions, was only to be explained on the double hypothesis, that he was a fool and no gentleman.

I have said they were man and woman.  I should have said man and child.  She was certainly not more than seventeen, pretty as an angel, just plump enough to damn a saint, and dressed in various shades of blue, from her stockings to her saucy cap, in a kind of taking gamut, the top note of which she flung me in a beam from her too appreciative eye.  There was no doubt about the case: I saw it all.  From a boarding-school, a black-board, a piano, and Clementi’s Sonatinas, the child had made a rash adventure upon life in the company of a half-bred hawbuck; and she was already not only regretting it, but expressing her regret with point and pungency.

As I alighted they both paused with that unmistakable air of being interrupted in a scene.  I uncovered to the lady and placed my services at their disposal.

It was the man who answered.  ‘There’s no use in shamming, sir,’ said he.  ‘This lady and I have run away, and her father’s after us: road to Gretna, sir.  And here have these nincompoops spilt us in the ditch and smashed the chaise!’

‘Very provoking,’ said I.

‘I don’t know when I’ve been so provoked!’ cried he, with a glance down the road, of mortal terror.

‘The father is no doubt very much incensed?’ I pursued civilly.

‘O God!’ cried the hawbuck.  ‘In short, you see, we must get out of this.  And I’ll tell you what—it may seem cool, but necessity has no law—if you would lend us your chaise to the next post-house, it would be the very thing, sir.’

‘I confess it seems cool,’ I replied.

‘What’s that you say, sir?’ he snapped.

‘I was agreeing with you,’ said I.  ‘Yes, it does seem cool; and what is more to the point, it seems unnecessary.  This thing can be arranged in a more satisfactory manner otherwise, I think.  You can doubtless ride?’

This opened a door on the matter of their previous dispute, and the fellow appeared life-sized in his true colours.  ‘That’s what I’ve been telling her: that, damn her! she must ride!’ he broke out.  ‘And if the gentleman’s of the same mind, why, damme, you shall!’

As he said so, he made a snatch at her wrist, which she evaded with horror.

I stepped between them.

‘No, sir,’ said I; ‘the lady shall not.’

He turned on me raging.  ‘And who are you to interfere?’ he roared.

‘There is here no question of who I am,’ I replied.  ‘I may be the devil or the Archbishop of Canterbury for what you know, or need know.  The point is that I can help you—it appears that nobody else can; and I will tell you how I propose to do it.  I will give the lady a seat in my chaise, if you will return the compliment by allowing my servant to ride one of your horses.’

I thought he would have sprung at my throat.

‘You have always the alternative before you: to wait here for the arrival of papa,’ I added.

And that settled him.  He cast another haggard look down the road, and capitulated.

‘I am sure, sir, the lady is very much obliged to you,’ he said, with an ill grace.

I gave her my hand; she mounted like a bird into the chaise; Rowley, grinning from ear to ear, closed the door behind us; the two impudent rascals of post-boys cheered and laughed aloud as we drove off; and my own postillion urged his horses at once into a rattling trot.  It was plain I was supposed by all to have done a very dashing act, and ravished the bride from the ravisher.

In the meantime I stole a look at the little lady.  She was in a state of pitiable discomposure, and her arms shook on her lap in her black lace mittens.

‘Madam—’ I began.

And she, in the same moment, finding her voice: ‘O, what you must think of me!’

‘Madam,’ said I, ‘what must any gentleman think when he sees youth, beauty and innocence in distress?  I wish I could tell you that I was old enough to be your father; I think we must give that up,’ I continued, with a smile.  ‘But I will tell you something about myself which ought to do as well, and to set that little heart at rest in my society.  I am a lover.  May I say it of myself—for I am not quite used to all the niceties of English—that I am a true lover?  There is one whom I admire, adore, obey; she is no less good than she is beautiful; if she were here, she would take you to her arms: conceive that she has sent me—that she has said to me, “Go, be her knight!”’

‘O, I know she must be sweet, I know she must be worthy of you!’ cried the little lady.  ‘She would never forget female decorum—nor make the terrible erratum I’ve done!’

And at this she lifted up her voice and wept.

This did not forward matters: it was in vain that I begged her to be more composed and to tell me a plain, consecutive tale of her misadventures; but she continued instead to pour forth the most extraordinary mixture of the correct school miss and the poor untutored little piece of womanhood in a false position—of engrafted pedantry and incoherent nature.

‘I am certain it must have been judicial blindness,’ she sobbed.  ‘I can’t think how I didn’t see it, but I didn’t; and he isn’t, is he?  And then a curtain rose . . . O, what a moment was that!  But I knew at once that you were; you had but to appear from your carriage, and I knew it, O, she must be a fortunate young lady!  And I have no fear with you, none—a perfect confidence.’

‘Madam,’ said