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

The guard call sounded; the hum of the town declined by little and little.  On all sides of us, in their different quarters, we could hear the watchman cry the hours along the street.  Often enough, during my stay in England, have I listened to these gruff or broken voices; or perhaps gone to my window when I lay sleepless, and watched the old gentleman hobble by upon the causeway with his cape and his cap, his hanger and his rattle.  It was ever a thought with me how differently that cry would re-echo in the chamber of lovers, beside the bed of death, or in the condemned cell.  I might be said to hear it that night myself in the condemned cell!  At length a fellow with a voice like a bull’s began to roar out in the opposite thoroughfare:

‘Past yin o’cloak, and a dark, haary moarnin’.’

At which we were all silently afoot.

As I stole about the battlements towards the—gallows, I was about to write—the sergeant-major, perhaps doubtful of my resolution, kept close by me, and occasionally proffered the most indigestible reassurances in my ear.  At last I could bear them no longer.

‘Be so obliging as to let me be!’ said I.  ‘I am neither a coward nor a fool.  What do you know of whether the rope be long enough?  But I shall know it in ten minutes!’

The good old fellow laughed in his moustache, and patted me.

It was all very well to show the disposition of my temper before a friend alone; before my assembled comrades the thing had to go handsomely.  It was then my time to come on the stage; and I hope I took it handsomely.

‘Now, gentlemen,’ said I, ‘if the rope is ready, here is the criminal!’

The tunnel was cleared, the stake driven, the rope extended.  As I moved forward to the place, many of my comrades caught me by the hand and wrung it, an attention I could well have done without.

‘Keep an eye on Clausel!’ I whispered to Laclas; and with that, got down on my elbows and knees took the rope in both hands, and worked myself, feet foremost, through the tunnel.  When the earth failed under my feet, I thought my heart would have stopped; and a moment after I was demeaning myself in mid-air like a drunken jumping-jack.  I have never been a model of piety, but at this juncture prayers and a cold sweat burst from me simultaneously.

The line was knotted at intervals of eighteen inches; and to the inexpert it may seem as if it should have been even easy to descend.  The trouble was, this devil of a piece of rope appeared to be inspired, not with life alone, but with a personal malignity against myself.  It turned to the one side, paused for a moment, and then spun me like a toasting-jack to the other; slipped like an eel from the clasp of my feet; kept me all the time in the most outrageous fury of exertion; and dashed me at intervals against the face of the rock.  I had no eyes to see with; and I doubt if there was anything to see but darkness.  I must occasionally have caught a gasp of breath, but it was quite unconscious.  And the whole forces of my mind were so consumed with losing hold and getting it again, that I could scarce have told whether I was going up or coming down.

Of a sudden I knocked against the cliff with such a thump as almost bereft me of my sense; and, as reason twinkled back, I was amazed to find that I was in a state of rest, that the face of the precipice here inclined outwards at an angle which relieved me almost wholly of the burthen of my own weight, and that one of my feet was safely planted on a ledge.  I drew one of the sweetest breaths in my experience, hugged myself against the rope, and closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy of relief.  It occurred to me next to see how far I was advanced on my unlucky journey, a point on which I had not a shadow of a guess.  I looked up: there was nothing above me but the blackness of the night and the fog.  I craned timidly forward and looked down.  There, upon a floor of darkness, I beheld a certain pattern of hazy lights, some of them aligned as in thoroughfares, others standing apart as in solitary houses; and before I could well realise it, or had in the least estimated my distance, a wave of nausea and vertigo warned me to lie back and close my eyes.  In this situation I had really but the one wish, and that was: something else to think of!  Strange to say, I got it: a veil was torn from my mind, and I saw what a fool I was—what fools we had all been—and that I had no business to be thus dangling between earth and heaven by my arms.  The only thing to have done was to have attached me to a rope and lowered me, and I had never the wit to see it till that moment!

I filled my lungs, got a good hold on my rope, and once more launched myself on the descent.  As it chanced, the worst of the danger was at an end, and I was so fortunate as to be never again exposed to any violent concussion.  Soon after I must have passed within a little distance of a bush of wallflower, for the scent of it came over me with that impression of reality which characterises scents in darkness.  This made me a second landmark, the ledge being my first.  I began accordingly to compute intervals of time: so much to the ledge, so much again to the wallflower, so much more below.  If I were not at the bottom of the rock, I calculated I must be near indeed to the end of the rope, and there was no doubt that I was not far from the end of my own resources.  I began to be light-headed and to be tempted to let go,—now arguing that I was certainly arrived within a few feet of the level and could safely risk a fall, anon persuaded I was still close at the top and it was idle to continue longer on the rock.  In the midst of which I came to a bearing on plain ground, and had nearly wept aloud.  My hands were as good as flayed, my courage entirely exhausted, and, what with the long strain and the sudden relief, my limbs shook under me with more than the violence of ague, and I was glad to cling to the rope.

But this was no time to give way.  I had (by God’s single mercy) got myself alive out of that fortress; and now I had to try to get the others, my comrades.  There was about a fathom of rope to spare; I got it by the end, and searched the whole ground thoroughly for anything to make it fast to.  In vain: the ground was broken and stony, but there grew not there so much as a bush of furze.

‘Now then,’ thought I to myself, ‘here begins a new lesson, and I believe it will prove richer than the first.  I am not strong enough to keep this rope extended.  If I do not keep it extended the next man will be dashed against the precipice.  There is no reason why he should have my extravagant good luck.  I see no reason why he should not fall—nor any place for him to fall on but my head.’

From where I was now standing there was occasionally visible, as the fog lightened, a lamp in one of the barrack windows, which gave me a measure of the height he had to fall and the horrid force that he must strike me with.  What was yet worse, we had agreed to do without signals: every so many minutes by Laclas’ watch another man was to be started from the battlements.  Now, I had seemed to myself to be about half an hour in my descent, and it seemed near as long again that I waited, straining on the rope for my next comrade to begin.  I began to be afraid that our conspiracy was out, that my friends were all secured, and that I should pass the remainder of the night, and be discovered in the morning, vainly clinging to the rope’s end like a hooked fish upon an angle.  I could not refrain, at this ridiculous image, from a chuckle of laughter.  And the next moment I knew, by the jerking of the rope, that my friend had crawled out of the tunnel and was fairly launched on his descent.  It appears it was the sailor who had insisted on succeeding me: as soon as my continued silence had assured him the rope was long enough, Gautier, for that was his name, had forgot his former arguments, and shown himself so extremely forward, that Laclas had given way.  It was like the fellow, who had no harm in him beyond an instinctive selfishness.  But he was like to have paid pretty dearly for the privilege.  Do as I would, I could not keep the rope as I could have wished it; and he ended at last by falling on me from a height of several yards, so that we both rolled together on the ground.  As soon as he could breathe he cursed me beyond belief, wept over his finger, which he had broken, and cursed me again.  I bade him be still and think shame of himself to be so great a cry-baby.  Did he not hear the round going by above? I asked; and who could tell but what the noise of his fall was already remarked, and the sentinels at the very moment leaning upon the battlements to listen?

The round, however, went by, and nothing was discovered; the third man came to the ground quite easily; the fourth was, of course, child’s play; and before there were ten of us collected, it seemed to me that, without the least injustice to my comrades, I might proceed to take care of myself.

I knew their plan: they had a map and an almanack, and designed for Grangemouth, where they were to steal a ship.  Suppose them to do so, I had no idea they were qualified to manage it after it was stolen.  Their whole escape, indeed, was the most haphazard thing imaginable; only the impatience of captives and the ignorance of private soldiers would have entertained so misbegotten a device; and though I played the good comrade and worked with them upon the tunnel, but for the lawyer’s message I should have let them go without me.  Well, now they were beyond my help, as they had always been beyond my counselling; and, without word said or leave taken, I stole out of the little crowd.  It is true I would rather have waited to shake hands with Laclas, but in the last man who had descended I thought I recognised Clausel, and since the scene in the shed my distrust of Clausel was perfect.  I believed the man to be capable of any infamy, and events have since shown that I was right.

CHAPTER VII—SWANSTON COTTAGE

I had two views.  The first was, naturally, to get clear of Edinburgh Castle and the town, to say nothing of my fellow-prisoners; the second to work to the southward so long as it was night, and be near Swanston Cottage by morning.  What I should do there and then, I had no guess, and did not greatly care, being a devotee of a couple of divinities called Chance and Circumstance.  Prepare, if possible; where it is impossible, work straight forward, and keep your eyes open and your tongue oiled.  Wit and a good exterior—there is all life in a nutshell.

I had at first a rather chequered journey: got involved in gardens, butted into houses, and had even once the misfortune to awake a sleeping family, the father of which, as I suppose, menaced me from the window with a blunderbuss.  Altogether, though I had been some time gone from my companions, I was still at no great distance, when a miserable accident put a period to the escape.  Of a sudden the night was divided by a scream.  This was followed by the sound of something falling, and that again by the report of a musket from the Castle battlements.  It was strange to hear the alarm spread through the city.  In the fortress drums were beat and a bell rung backward.  On all hands the watchmen sprang their rattles.  Even in that limbo or no-man’s-land where I was wandering, lights were made in the houses; sashes were flung up; I could hear neighbouring families converse from window to window, and at length I was challenged myself.

‘Wha’s that?’ cried a big