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

I felt him clasp my hand, and there were tears in his voice.  ‘’Tis but a scratch, my child; here is papa, who is taking good care of you.  Your shoulder is bound up; we have dressed you in your clothes again, and it will all be well.’

At this I began to remember.  ‘And Goguelat?’ I gasped.

‘He cannot bear to be moved; he has his bellyful; ’tis a bad business,’ said the sergeant-major.

The idea of having killed a man with such an instrument as half a pair of scissors seemed to turn my stomach.  I am sure I might have killed a dozen with a firelock, a sabre, a bayonet, or any accepted weapon, and been visited by no such sickness of remorse.  And to this feeling every unusual circumstance of our rencounter, the darkness in which we had fought, our nakedness, even the resin on the twine, appeared to contribute.  I ran to my fallen adversary, kneeled by him, and could only sob his name.

He bade me compose myself.  ‘You have given me the key of the fields, comrade,’ said he.  ‘Sans rancune!’

At this my horror redoubled.  Here had we two expatriated Frenchmen engaged in an ill-regulated combat like the battles of beasts.  Here was he, who had been all his life so great a ruffian, dying in a foreign land of this ignoble injury, and meeting death with something of the spirit of a Bayard.  I insisted that the guards should be summoned and a doctor brought.  ‘It may still be possible to save him,’ I cried.

The sergeant-major reminded me of our engagement.  ‘If you had been wounded,’ said he, ‘you must have lain there till the patrol came by and found you.  It happens to be Goguelat—and so must he!  Come, child, time to go to by-by.’  And as I still resisted, ‘Champdivers!’ he said, ‘this is weakness.  You pain me.’

‘Ay, off to your beds with you!’ said Goguelat, and named us in a company with one of his jovial gross epithets.

Accordingly the squad lay down in the dark and simulated, what they certainly were far from experiencing, sleep.  It was not yet late.  The city, from far below, and all around us, sent up a sound of wheels and feet and lively voices.  Yet awhile, and the curtain of the cloud was rent across, and in the space of sky between the eaves of the shed and the irregular outline of the ramparts a multitude of stars appeared.  Meantime, in the midst of us lay Goguelat, and could not always withhold himself from groaning.

We heard the round far off; heard it draw slowly nearer.  Last of all, it turned the corner and moved into our field of vision: two file of men and a corporal with a lantern, which he swung to and fro, so as to cast its light in the recesses of the yards and sheds.

‘Hullo!’ cried the corporal, pausing as he came by Goguelat.

He stooped with his lantern.  All our hearts were flying.

‘What devil’s work is this?’ he cried, and with a startling voice summoned the guard.

We were all afoot upon the instant; more lanterns and soldiers crowded in front of the shed; an officer elbowed his way in.  In the midst was the big naked body, soiled with blood.  Some one had covered him with his blanket; but as he lay there in agony, he had partly thrown it off.

‘This is murder!’ cried the officer.  ‘You wild beasts, you will hear of this to-morrow.’

As Goguelat was raised and laid upon a stretcher, he cried to us a cheerful and blasphemous farewell.

CHAPTER III—MAJOR CHEVENIX COMES INTO THE STORY, AND GOGUELAT GOES OUT

There was never any talk of a recovery, and no time was lost in getting the man’s deposition.  He gave but the one account of it: that he had committed suicide because he was sick of seeing so many Englishmen.  The doctor vowed it was impossible, the nature and direction of the wound forbidding it.  Goguelat replied that he was more ingenious than the other thought for, and had propped up the weapon in the ground and fallen on the point—‘just like Nebuchadnezzar,’ he added, winking to the assistants.  The doctor, who was a little, spruce, ruddy man of an impatient temper, pished and pshawed and swore over his patient.  ‘Nothing to be made of him!’ he cried.  ‘A perfect heathen.  If we could only find the weapon!’  But the weapon had ceased to exist.  A little resined twine was perhaps blowing about in the castle gutters; some bits of broken stick may have trailed in corners; and behold, in the pleasant air of the morning, a dandy prisoner trimming his nails with a pair of scissors!

Finding the wounded man so firm, you may be sure the authorities did not leave the rest of us in peace.  No stone was left unturned.  We were had in again and again to be examined, now singly, now in twos and threes.  We were threatened with all sorts of impossible severities and tempted with all manner of improbable rewards.  I suppose I was five times interrogated, and came off from each with flying colours.  I am like old Souvaroff, I cannot understand a soldier being taken aback by any question; he should answer, as he marches on the fire, with an instant briskness and gaiety.  I may have been short of bread, gold or grace; I was never yet found wanting in an answer.  My comrades, if they were not all so ready, were none of them less staunch; and I may say here at once that the inquiry came to nothing at the time, and the death of Goguelat remained a mystery of the prison.  Such were the veterans of France!  And yet I should be disingenuous if I did not own this was a case apart; in ordinary circumstances, some one might have stumbled or been intimidated into an admission; and what bound us together with a closeness beyond that of mere comrades was a secret to which we were all committed and a design in which all were equally engaged.  No need to inquire as to its nature: there is only one desire, and only one kind of design, that blooms in prisons.  And the fact that our tunnel was near done supported and inspired us.

I came off in public, as I have said, with flying colours; the sittings of the court of inquiry died away like a tune that no one listens to; and yet I was unmasked—I, whom my very adversary defended, as good as confessed, as good as told the nature of the quarrel, and by so doing prepared for myself in the future a most anxious, disagreeable adventure.  It was the third morning after the duel, and Goguelat was still in life, when the time came round for me to give Major Chevenix a lesson.  I was fond of this occupation; not that he paid me much—no more, indeed, than eighteenpence a month, the customary figure, being a miser in the grain; but because I liked his breakfasts and (to some extent) himself.  At least, he was a man of education; and of the others with whom I had any opportunity of speech, those that would not have held a book upsidedown would have torn the pages out for pipe-lights.  For I must repeat again that our body of prisoners was exceptional: there was in Edinburgh Castle none of that educational busyness that distinguished some of the other prisons, so that men entered them unable to read, and left them fit for high employments.  Chevenix was handsome, and surprisingly young to be a major: six feet in his stockings, well set up, with regular features and very clear grey eyes.  It was impossible to pick a fault in him, and yet the sum-total was displeasing.  Perhaps he was too clean; he seemed to bear about with him the smell of soap.  Cleanliness is good, but I cannot bear a man’s nails to seem japanned.  And certainly he was too self-possessed and cold.  There was none of the fire of youth, none of the swiftness of the soldier, in this young officer.  His kindness was cold, and cruel cold; his deliberation exasperating.  And perhaps it was from this character, which is very much the opposite of my own, that even in these days, when he was of service to me, I approached him with suspicion and reserve.

I looked over his exercise in the usual form, and marked six faults.

‘H’m.  Six,’ says he, looking at the paper.  ‘Very annoying!  I can never get it right.’

‘Oh, but you make excellent progress!’ I said.  I would not discourage him, you understand, but he was congenitally unable to learn French.  Some fire, I think, is needful, and he had quenched his fire in soapsuds.

He put the exercise down, leaned his chin upon his hand, and looked at me with clear, severe eyes.

‘I think we must have a little talk,’ said he.

‘I am entirely at your disposition,’ I replied; but I quaked, for I knew what subject to expect.

‘You have been some time giving me these lessons,’ he went on, ‘and I am tempted to think rather well of you.  I believe you are a gentleman.’

‘I have that honour, sir,’ said I.

‘You have seen me for the same period.  I do not know how I strike you; but perhaps you will be prepared to believe that I also am a man of honour,’ said he.

‘I require no assurances; the thing is manifest,’ and I bowed.

‘Very well, then,’ said he.  ‘What about this Goguelat?’

‘You heard me yesterday before the court,’ I began.  ‘I was awakened only—’

‘Oh yes; I “heard you yesterday before the court,” no doubt,’ he interrupted, ‘and I remember perfectly that you were “awakened only.”  I could repeat the most of it by rote, indeed.  But do you suppose that I believed you for a moment?’

‘Neither would you believe me if I were to repeat it here,’ said I.

‘I may be wrong—we shall soon see,’ says he; ‘but my impression is that you will not “repeat it here.”  My impression is that you have come into this room, and that you will tell me something before you go out.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

‘Let me explain,’ he continued.  ‘Your evidence, of course, is nonsense.  I put it by, and the court put it by.’

‘My compliments and thanks!’ said I.

‘You must know—that’s the short and the long,’ he proceeded.  ‘All of you in shed B are bound to know.  And I want to ask you where is the common-sense of keeping up this farce, and maintaining this cock-and-bull story between friends.  Come, come, my good fellow, own yourself beaten, and laugh at it yourself.’

‘Well, I hear you, go ahead,’ said I.  ‘You put your heart in it.’

He crossed his legs slowly.  ‘I can very well understand,’ he began, ‘that precautions have had to be taken.  I dare say an oath was administered.  I can comprehend that perfectly.’  (He was watching me all the time with his cold, bright eyes.)  ‘And I can comprehend that, about an affair of honour, you would be very particular to keep it.’

‘About an affair of honour?’ I repeated, like a man quite puzzled.

‘It was not an affair of honour, then?’ he asked.

‘What was not?  I do not follow,’ said I.

He gave no sign of impatience; simply sat awhile silent, and began again in the same placid and good-natured voice: ‘The court and I were at one in setting aside your evidence.  It could not deceive a child.  But there was a difference between myself and the other officers, because I knew my man and they did not.  They saw in you a common soldier, and I knew you for a gentleman.  To them your evidence was a leash of lies, which they yawned to hear you telling.  Now, I was asking myself, how far will a gentleman go?  Not surely so far as to help hush a murder up?  So that—when I heard you tell how you knew nothing of the matter, and were only awakened by the corporal, and all the rest of it—I translated your statements into something else.  Now, Champdivers,’ he cried, springing up lively and coming towards me with animation, ‘I am going to tell you what that was, and you are going to help me to see justice done: how, I don’t know, for of course you are under oath—but somehow.  Mark what I’m going to say.’

At that moment he laid a heavy, hard grip upon my shoulder; and whether he said anything more or came to a full stop at once, I am sure I could not tell you to this day.  For, as the devil would have it, the shoulder he laid hold of was the one Goguelat had pinked.  The wound was but a scratch; it was healing with the first intention; but in the clutch of Major Chevenix it gave me agony.  My head swam; the sweat poured off my face; I must have grown deadly pale.

He removed his hand as suddenly as he had laid it there.  ‘What is wrong with you?’ said he.

‘It is nothing,’