St. Ives: Being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England, Stevenson [fb2 epub reader txt] 📗

know you must get it off your hands somehow.’

I do not know when I have been better entertained than by this impudent proposal.  It was broadly funny, and I suppose the least tempting offer in the world.  For all that, it came very welcome, for it gave me the occasion to laugh.  This I did with the most complete abandonment, till the tears ran down my cheeks; and ever and again, as the fit abated, I would get another view of the landlord’s face, and go off into another paroxysm.

‘You droll creature, you will be the death of me yet!’ I cried, drying my eyes.

My friend was now wholly disconcerted; he knew not where to look, nor yet what to say; and began for the first time to conceive it possible he was mistaken.

‘You seem rather to enjoy a laugh, sir,’ said he.

‘O, yes!  I am quite an original,’ I replied, and laughed again.

Presently, in a changed voice, he offered me twenty pounds for the chaise; I ran him up to twenty-five, and closed with the offer: indeed, I was glad to get anything; and if I haggled, it was not in the desire of gain, but with the view at any price of securing a safe retreat.  For although hostilities were suspended, he was yet far from satisfied; and I could read his continued suspicions in the cloudy eye that still hovered about my face.  At last they took shape in words.

‘This is all very well,’ says he: ‘you carry it off well; but for all that, I must do my duty.’

I had my strong effect in reserve; it was to burn my ships with a vengeance!  I rose.  ‘Leave the room,’ said I.  ‘This is insuperable.  Is the man mad?’  And then, as if already half-ashamed of my passion: ‘I can take a joke as well as any one,’ I added; ‘but this passes measure.  Send my servant and the bill.’

When he had left me alone, I considered my own valour with amazement.  I had insulted him; I had sent him away alone; now, if ever, he would take what was the only sensible resource, and fetch the constable.  But there was something instinctively treacherous about the man which shrank from plain courses.  And, with all his cleverness, he missed the occasion of fame.  Rowley and I were suffered to walk out of his door, with all our baggage, on foot, with no destination named, except in the vague statement that we were come ‘to view the lakes’; and my friend only watched our departure with his chin in his hand, still moodily irresolute.

I think this one of my great successes.  I was exposed, unmasked, summoned to do a perfectly natural act, which must prove my doom and which I had not the slightest pretext for refusing.  I kept my head, stuck to my guns, and, against all likelihood, here I was once more at liberty and in the king’s highway.  This was a strong lesson never to despair; and, at the same time, how many hints to be cautious! and what a perplexed and dubious business the whole question of my escape now appeared!  That I should have risked perishing upon a trumpery question of a pourboire, depicted in lively colours the perils that perpetually surrounded us.  Though, to be sure, the initial mistake had been committed before that; and if I had not suffered myself to be drawn a little deep in confidences to the innocent Dolly, there need have been no tumble at the inn of Kirkby-Lonsdale.  I took the lesson to heart, and promised myself in the future to be more reserved.  It was none of my business to attend to broken chaises or shipwrecked travellers.  I had my hands full of my own affairs; and my best defence would be a little more natural selfishness and a trifle less imbecile good-nature.

CHAPTER XXV—I MEET A CHEERFUL EXTRAVAGANT

I pass over the next fifty or sixty leagues of our journey without comment.  The reader must be growing weary of scenes of travel; and for my own part I have no cause to recall these particular miles with any pleasure.  We were mainly occupied with attempts to obliterate our trail, which (as the result showed) were far from successful; for, on my cousin following, he was able to run me home with the least possible loss of time, following the claret-coloured chaise to Kirkby-Lonsdale, where I think the landlord must have wept to learn what he had missed, and tracing us thereafter to the doors of the coach-office in Edinburgh without a single check.  Fortune did not favour me, and why should I recapitulate the details of futile precautions which deceived nobody, and wearisome arts which proved to be artless?

The day was drawing to an end when Mr. Rowley and I bowled into Edinburgh to the stirring sound of the guard’s bugle and the clattering team.  I was here upon my field of battle; on the scene of my former captivity, escape and exploits; and in the same city with my love.  My heart expanded; I have rarely felt more of a hero.  All down the Bridges I sat by the driver with my arms folded and my face set, unflinchingly meeting every eye, and prepared every moment for a cry of recognition.  Hundreds of the population were in the habit of visiting the Castle, where it was my practice (before the days of Flora) to make myself conspicuous among the prisoners; and I think it an extraordinary thing that I should have encountered so few to recognise me.  But doubtless a clean chin is a disguise in itself; and the change is great from a suit of sulphur-yellow to fine linen, a well-fitting mouse-coloured great-coat furred in black, a pair of tight trousers of fashionable cut, and a hat of inimitable curl.  After all, it was more likely that I should have recognised our visitors, than that they should have identified the modish gentleman with the miserable prisoner in the Castle.

I was glad to set foot on the flagstones, and to escape from the crowd that had assembled to receive the mail.  Here we were, with but little daylight before us, and that on Saturday afternoon, the eve of the famous Scottish Sabbath, adrift in the New Town of Edinburgh, and overladen with baggage.  We carried it ourselves.  I would not take a cab, nor so much as hire a porter, who might afterwards serve as a link between my lodgings and the mail, and connect me again with the claret-coloured chaise and Aylesbury.  For I was resolved to break the chain of evidence for good, and to begin life afresh (so far as regards caution) with a new character.  The first step was to find lodgings, and to find them quickly.  This was the more needful as Mr. Rowley and I, in our smart clothes and with our cumbrous burthen, made a noticeable appearance in the streets at that time of the day and in that quarter of the town, which was largely given up to fine folk, bucks and dandies and young ladies, or respectable professional men on their way home to dinner.

On the north side of St. James’ Square I was so happy as to spy a bill in a third-floor window.  I was equally indifferent to cost and convenience in my choice of a lodging—‘any port in a storm’ was the principle on which I was prepared to act; and Rowley and I made at once for the common entrance and sealed the stair.

We were admitted by a very sour-looking female in bombazine.  I gathered she had all her life been depressed by a series of bereavements, the last of which might very well have befallen her the day before; and I instinctively lowered my voice when I addressed her.  She admitted she had rooms to let—even showed them to us—a sitting-room and bedroom in a suite, commanding a fine prospect to the Firth and Fifeshire, and in themselves well proportioned and comfortably furnished, with pictures on the wall, shells on the mantelpiece, and several books upon the table which I found afterwards to be all of a devotional character, and all presentation copies, ‘to my Christian friend,’ or ‘to my devout acquaintance in the Lord, Bethiah McRankine.’  Beyond this my ‘Christian friend’ could not be made to advance: no, not even to do that which seemed the most natural and pleasing thing in the world—I mean to name her price—but stood before us shaking her head, and at times mourning like the dove, the picture of depression and defence.  She had a voice the most querulous I have ever heard, and with this she produced a whole regiment of difficulties and criticisms.

She could not promise an attendance.

‘Well, madam,’ said I, ‘and what is my servant for?’

‘Him?’ she asked.  ‘Be gude to us!  Is he your servant?’

‘I am sorry, ma’am, he meets with your disapproval.’

‘Na, I never said that.  But he’s young.  He’ll be a great breaker, I’m thinkin’.  Ay! he’ll be a great responsibeelity to ye, like.  Does he attend to his releegion?’

‘Yes, m’m,’ returned Rowley, with admirable promptitude, and, immediately closing his eyes, as if from habit, repeated the following distich with more celerity than fervour:—

‘Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
Bless the bed that I lie on!’

‘Nhm!’ said the lady, and maintained an awful silence.

‘Well, ma’am,’ said I, ‘it seems we are never to hear the beginning of your terms, let alone the end of them.  Come—a good movement! and let us be either off or on.’

She opened her lips slowly.  ‘Ony raferences?’ she inquired, in a voice like a bell.

I opened my pocket-book and showed her a handful of bank bills.  ‘I think, madam, that these are unexceptionable,’ said I.

‘Ye’ll be wantin’ breakfast late?’ was her reply.

‘Madam, we want breakfast at whatever hour it suits you to give it, from four in the morning till four in the afternoon!’ I cried.  ‘Only tell us your figure, if your mouth be large enough to let it out!’

‘I couldnae give ye supper the nicht,’ came the echo.

‘We shall go out to supper, you incorrigible female!’ I vowed, between laughter and tears.  ‘Here—this is going to end!  I want you for a landlady—let me tell you that!—and I am going to have my way.  You won’t tell me what you charge?  Very well; I will do without!  I can trust you!  You don’t seem to know when you have a good lodger; but I know perfectly when I have an honest landlady!  Rowley, unstrap the valises!’

Will it be credited?  The monomaniac fell to rating me for my indiscretion!  But the battle was over; these were her last guns, and more in the nature of a salute than of renewed hostilities.  And presently she condescended on very moderate terms, and Rowley and I were able to escape in quest of supper.  Much time had, however, been lost; the sun was long down, the lamps glimmered along the streets, and the voice of a watchman already resounded in the neighbouring Leith Road.  On our first arrival I had observed a place of entertainment not far off, in a street behind the Register House.  Thither we found our way, and sat down to a late dinner alone.  But we had scarce given our orders before the door opened, and a tall young fellow entered with something of a lurch, looked about him, and approached the same table.

‘Give you good evening, most grave and reverend seniors!’ said he.  ‘Will you permit a wanderer, a pilgrim—the pilgrim of love, in short—to come to temporary anchor under your lee?  I care not who knows it, but I have a passionate aversion from the bestial practice of solitary feeding!’

‘You are welcome, sir,’ said I, ‘if I may take upon me so far to play the host in a public place.’

He looked startled, and fixed a hazy eye on me, as he sat down.

‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you are a man not without some tincture of letters, I perceive!  What shall we drink, sir?’

I mentioned I had already called for a pot of porter.

‘A modest pot—the seasonable quencher?’ said he.  ‘Well, I do not know but what I could look at a modest pot myself!  I am, for the moment, in precarious health.  Much study hath heated my brain, much walking wearied my—well, it seems to be more my eyes!’

‘You have walked far, I dare say?’ I suggested.

‘Not so much far as often,’ he replied.  ‘There is in this city—to which, I think, you are a stranger?  Sir, to your very good health and our better acquaintance!—there is, in this city of Dunedin, a certain implication of streets which reflects the utmost credit on the designer and the publicans—at every hundred yards is seated the Judicious Tavern, so that persons of contemplative mind are secure, at moderate distances, of refreshment.  I have been doing a trot in that favoured quarter, favoured by art and nature.  A few chosen comrades—enemies of publicity and friends to wit and wine—obliged me with their society.  “Along the cool, sequestered vale of Register Street we kept the uneven tenor of our way,” sir.’

‘It struck me, as