St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England by Stevenson (rom com books to read .TXT) 📗

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.

CHAPTER XXI—I BECOME THE OWNER OF A CLARET-COLOURED CHAISE

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’ll see.’

‘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