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

very handy,’ said I.

‘I’d better go at once and show it to the old gal, ’adn’t I?’ he asked.

I told him, by all means; and he was gone upon the instant, gleeful as though to a game of football.

I took up the paper and read carelessly on, my thoughts engaged with my immediate danger, till I struck on the next paragraph:—

‘In connection with the recent horrid murder in the Castle, we are desired to make public the following intelligence.  The soldier, Champdivers, is supposed to be in the neighbourhood of this city.  He is about the middle height or rather under, of a pleasing appearance and highly genteel address.  When last heard of he wore a fashionable suit of pearl-grey, and boots with fawn-coloured tops.  He is accompanied by a servant about sixteen years of age, speaks English without any accent, and passed under the alias of Ramornie.  A reward is offered for his apprehension.’

In a moment I was in the next room, stripping from me the pearl-coloured suit!

I confess I was now a good deal agitated.  It is difficult to watch the toils closing slowly and surely about you, and to retain your composure; and I was glad that Rowley was not present to spy on my confusion.  I was flushed, my breath came thick; I cannot remember a time when I was more put out.

And yet I must wait and do nothing, and partake of my meals, and entertain the ever-garrulous Rowley, as though I were entirely my own man.  And if I did not require to entertain Mrs. McRankine also, that was but another drop of bitterness in my cup!  For what ailed my landlady, that she should hold herself so severely aloof, that she should refuse conversation, that her eyes should be reddened, that I should so continually hear the voice of her private supplications sounding through the house?  I was much deceived, or she had read the insidious paragraph and recognised the comminated pearl-grey suit.  I remember now a certain air with which she had laid the paper on my table, and a certain sniff, between sympathy and defiance, with which she had announced it: ‘There’s your Mercury for ye!’

In this direction, at least, I saw no pressing danger; her tragic countenance betokened agitation; it was plain she was wrestling with her conscience, and the battle still hung dubious.  The question of what to do troubled me extremely.  I could not venture to touch such an intricate and mysterious piece of machinery as my landlady’s spiritual nature: it might go off at a word, and in any direction, like a badly-made firework.  And while I praised myself extremely for my wisdom in the past, that I had made so much a friend of her, I was all abroad as to my conduct in the present.  There seemed an equal danger in pressing and in neglecting the accustomed marks of familiarity.  The one extreme looked like impudence, and might annoy, the other was a practical confession of guilt.  Altogether, it was a good hour for me when the dusk began to fall in earnest on the streets of Edinburgh, and the voice of an early watchman bade me set forth.

I reached the neighbourhood of the cottage before seven; and as I breasted the steep ascent which leads to the garden wall, I was struck with surprise to hear a dog.  Dogs I had heard before, but only from the hamlet on the hillside above.  Now, this dog was in the garden itself, where it roared aloud in paroxysms of fury, and I could hear it leaping and straining on the chain.  I waited some while, until the brute’s fit of passion had roared itself out.  Then, with the utmost precaution, I drew near again; and finally approached the garden wall.  So soon as I had clapped my head above the level, however, the barking broke forth again with redoubled energy.  Almost at the same time, the door of the cottage opened, and Ronald and the Major appeared upon the threshold with a lantern.  As they so stood, they were almost immediately below me, strongly illuminated, and within easy earshot.  The Major pacified the dog, who took instead to low, uneasy growling intermingled with occasional yelps.

‘Good thing I brought Towzer!’ said Chevenix.

‘Damn him, I wonder where he is!’ said Ronald; and he moved the lantern up and down, and turned the night into a shifting puzzle-work of gleam and shadow.  ‘I think I’ll make a sally.’

‘I don’t think you will,’ replied Chevenix.  ‘When I agreed to come out here and do sentry-go, it was on one condition, Master Ronald: don’t you forget that!  Military discipline, my boy!  Our beat is this path close about the house.  Down, Towzer! good boy, good boy—gently, then!’ he went on, caressing his confounded monster.

‘To think!  The beggar may be hearing us this minute!’ cried Ronald.

‘Nothing more probable,’ said the Major.  ‘You there, St. Ives?’ he added, in a distinct but guarded voice.  ‘I only want to tell you, you had better go home.  Mr. Gilchrist and I take watch and watch.’

The game was up.  ‘Beaucoup de plaisir!’ I replied, in the same tones.  ‘Il fait un peu froid pour veiller; gardez-vous des engelures!’

I suppose it was done in a moment of ungovernable rage; but in spite of the excellent advice he had given to Ronald the moment before, Chevenix slipped the chain, and the dog sprang, straight as an arrow, up the bank.  I stepped back, picked up a stone of about twelve pounds weight, and stood ready.  With a bound the beast landed on the cope-stone of the wall; and, almost in the same instant, my missile caught him fair in the face.  He gave a stifled cry, went tumbling back where he had come from, and I could hear the twelve-pounder accompany him in his fall.  Chevenix, at the same moment, broke out in a roaring voice: ‘The hell-hound!  If he’s killed my dog!’ and I judged, upon all grounds, it was as well to be off.

CHAPTER XXX—EVENTS OF WEDNESDAY; THE UNIVERSITY OF CRAMOND

I awoke to much diffidence, even to a feeling that might be called the beginnings of panic, and lay for hours in my bed considering the situation.  Seek where I pleased, there was nothing to encourage me and plenty to appal.  They kept a close watch about the cottage; they had a beast of a watch-dog—at least, unless I had settled it; and if I had, I knew its bereaved master would only watch the more indefatigably for the loss.  In the pardonable ostentation of love I had given all the money I could spare to Flora; I had thought it glorious that the hunted exile should come down, like Jupiter, in a shower of gold, and pour thousands in the lap of the beloved.  Then I had in an hour of arrant folly buried what remained to me in a bank in George Street.  And now I must get back the one or the other; and which? and how?

As I tossed in my bed, I could see three possible courses, all extremely perilous.  First, Rowley might have been mistaken; the bank might not be watched; it might still be possible for him to draw the money on the deposit receipt.  Second, I might apply again to Robbie.  Or, third, I might dare everything, go to the Assembly Ball, and speak with Flora under the eyes of all Edinburgh.  This last alternative, involving as it did the most horrid risks, and the delay of forty-eight hours, I did but glance at with an averted head, and turned again to the consideration of the others.  It was the likeliest thing in the world that Robbie had been warned to have no more to do with me. The whole policy of the Gilchrists was in the hands of Chevenix; and I thought this was a precaution so elementary that he was certain to have taken it.  If he had not, of course I was all right: Robbie would manage to communicate with Flora; and by four o’clock I might be on the south road and, I was going to say, a free man.  Lastly, I must assure myself with my own eyes whether the bank in George Street were beleaguered.

I called to Rowley and questioned him tightly as to the appearance of the Bow Street officer.

‘What sort of looking man is he, Rowley?’ I asked, as I began to dress.

‘Wot sort of a looking man he is?’ repeated Rowley.  ‘Well, I don’t very well know wot you would say, Mr. Anne.  He ain’t a beauty, any’ow.’

‘Is he tall?’

‘Tall?  Well, no, I shouldn’t say tall Mr. Anne.’

‘Well, then, is he short?’

‘Short?  No, I don’t think I would say he was what you would call short.  No, not piticular short, sir.’

‘Then, I suppose, he must be about the middle height?’

‘Well, you might say it, sir; but not remarkable so.’

I smothered an oath.

‘Is he clean-shaved?’ I tried him again.

‘Clean-shaved?’ he repeated, with the same air of anxious candour.

‘Good heaven, man, don’t repeat my words like a parrot!’ I cried.  ‘Tell me what the man was like: it is of the first importance that I should be able to recognise him.’

‘I’m trying to, Mr. Anne.  But clean-shaved?  I don’t seem to rightly get hold of that p’int.  Sometimes it might appear to me like as if he was; and sometimes like as if he wasn’t.  No, it wouldn’t surprise me now if you was to tell me he ’ad a bit o’ whisker.’

‘Was the man red-faced?’ I roared, dwelling on each syllable.

‘I don’t think you need go for to get cross about it, Mr. Anne!’ said he.  ‘I’m tellin’ you every blessed thing I see!  Red-faced?  Well, no, not as you would remark upon.’

A dreadful calm fell upon me.

‘Was he anywise pale?’ I asked.

‘Well, it don’t seem to me as though he were.  But I tell you truly, I didn’t take much heed to that.’

‘Did he look like a drinking man?’

‘Well, no.  If you please, sir, he looked more like an eating one.’

‘Oh, he was stout, was he?’

‘No, sir.  I couldn’t go so far as that.  No, he wasn’t not to say stout.  If anything, lean rather.’

I need not go on with the infuriating interview.  It ended as it began, except that Rowley was in tears, and that I had acquired one fact.  The man was drawn for me as being of any height you like to mention, and of any degree of corpulence or leanness; clean-shaved or not, as the case might be; the colour of his hair Rowley ‘could not take it upon himself to put a name on’; that of his eyes he thought to have been blue—nay, it was the one point on which he attained to a kind of tearful certainty.  ‘I’ll take my davy on it,’ he asseverated.  They proved to have been as black as sloes, very little and very near together.  So much for the evidence of the artless!  And the fact, or rather the facts, acquired?  Well, they had to do not with the person but with his clothing.  The man wore knee-breeches and white stockings; his coat was ‘some kind of a lightish colour—or betwixt that and dark’; and he wore a ‘mole-skin weskit.’  As if this were not enough, he presently haled me from my breakfast in a prodigious flutter, and showed me an honest and rather venerable citizen passing in the Square.

‘That’s him, sir,’ he cried, ‘the very moral of him!  Well, this one is better dressed, and p’r’aps a trifler taller; and in the face he don’t favour him noways at all, sir.  No, not when I come to look again, ’e don’t seem to favour him noways.’

‘Jackass!’ said I, and I think the greatest stickler for manners will admit the epithet to have been justified.

Meanwhile the appearance of my landlady added a great load of anxiety to what I already suffered.  It was plain that she had not slept; equally plain that she had wept copiously.  She sighed, she groaned, she drew in her breath, she shook her head, as she waited on table.  In short, she seemed in so precarious a state, like a petard three times charged with hysteria, that I did not dare to address her; and stole out of the house on tiptoe, and actually ran downstairs, in the fear that she might call me back.  It was plain that this degree of tension could not last long.

It was my first care to go to George Street, which I reached (by good luck) as a boy was taking down the bank shutters.  A man was conversing with him; he had white stockings and a moleskin waistcoat, and was as ill-looking a rogue as you would want to see in a day’s journey.  This seemed to agree fairly well with Rowley’s signalement: he had declared emphatically (if you remember), and had stuck to it besides, that the companion of the great Lavender was no beauty.

Thence I made my way to Mr. Robbie’s, where I rang the bell.  A servant answered the summons, and told me the lawyer was engaged, as I had half expected.

‘Wha