Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (312 page)

Two minutes afterwards I was again posting in the dark along the highway; to explain which sudden movement of retreat I must trouble the reader with a reminiscence of my services.

I lay one night with the out-pickets in Castile.  We were in close touch with the enemy; the usual orders had been issued against smoking, fires, and talk, and both armies lay as quiet as mice, when I saw the English sentinel opposite making a signal by holding up his musket.  I repeated it, and we both crept together in the dry bed of a stream, which made the demarcation of the armies.  It was wine he wanted, of which we had a good provision, and the English had quite run out.  He gave me the money, and I, as was the custom, left him my firelock in pledge, and set off for the canteen.  When I returned with a skin of wine, behold, it had pleased some uneasy devil of an English officer to withdraw the outposts!  Here was a situation with a vengeance, and I looked for nothing but ridicule in the present and punishment in the future.  Doubtless our officers winked pretty hard at this interchange of courtesies, but doubtless it would be impossible to wink at so gross a fault, or rather so pitiable a misadventure as mine; and you are to conceive me wandering in the plains of Castile, benighted, charged with a wine-skin for which I had no use, and with no knowledge whatever of the whereabouts of my musket, beyond that it was somewhere in my Lord Wellington’s army.  But my Englishman was either a very honest fellow, or else extremely thirsty, and at last contrived to advertise me of his new position.  Now, the English sentry in Castile, and the wounded hero in the Durham public-house, were one and the same person; and if he had been a little less drunk, or myself less lively in getting away, the travels of M. St. Ives might have come to an untimely end.

I suppose this woke me up; it stirred in me besides a spirit of opposition, and in spite of cold, darkness, the highwaymen and the footpads, I determined to walk right on till breakfast-time: a happy resolution, which enabled me to observe one of those traits of manners which at once depict a country and condemn it.  It was near midnight when I saw, a great way ahead of me, the light of many torches; presently after, the sound of wheels reached me, and the slow tread of feet, and soon I had joined myself to the rear of a sordid, silent, and lugubrious procession, such as we see in dreams.  Close on a hundred persons marched by torchlight in unbroken silence; in their midst a cart, and in the cart, on an inclined platform, the dead body of a man — the centre-piece of this solemnity, the hero whose obsequies we were come forth at this unusual hour to celebrate.  It was but a plain, dingy old fellow of fifty or sixty, his throat cut, his shirt turned over as though to show the wound.  Blue trousers and brown socks completed his attire, if we can talk so of the dead.  He had a horrid look of a waxwork.  In the tossing of the lights he seemed to make faces and mouths at us, to frown, and to be at times upon the point of speech.  The cart, with this shabby and tragic freight, and surrounded by its silent escort and bright torches, continued for some distance to creak along the high-road, and I to follow it in amazement, which was soon exchanged for horror.  At the corner of a lane the procession stopped, and, as the torches ranged themselves along the hedgerow-side, I became aware of a grave dug in the midst of the thoroughfare, and a provision of quicklime piled in the ditch.  The cart was backed to the margin, the body slung off the platform and dumped into the grave with an irreverent roughness.  A sharpened stake had hitherto served it for a pillow.  It was now withdrawn, held in its place by several volunteers, and a fellow with a heavy mallet (the sound of which still haunts me at night) drove it home through the bosom of the corpse.  The hole was filled with quicklime, and the bystanders, as if relieved of some oppression, broke at once into a sound of whispered speech.

My shirt stuck to me, my heart had almost ceased beating, and I found my tongue with difficulty.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I gasped to a neighbour, ‘what is this? what has he done? is it allowed?’

‘Why, where do you come from?’ replied the man.

‘I am a traveller, sir,’ said I, ‘and a total stranger in this part of the country.  I had lost my way when I saw your torches, and came by chance on this — this incredible scene.  Who was the man?’

‘A suicide,’ said he.  ‘Ay, he was a bad one, was Johnnie Green.’

It appeared this was a wretch who had committed many barbarous murders, and being at last upon the point of discovery fell of his own hand.  And the nightmare at the crossroads was the regular punishment, according to the laws of England, for an act which the Romans honoured as a virtue!  Whenever an Englishman begins to prate of civilisation (as, indeed, it’s a defect they are rather prone to), I hear the measured blows of a mallet, see the bystanders crowd with torches about the grave, smile a little to myself in conscious superiority — and take a thimbleful of brandy for the stomach’s sake.

I believe it must have been at my next stage, for I remember going to bed extremely early, that I came to the model of a good old-fashioned English inn, and was attended on by the picture of a pretty chambermaid.  We had a good many pleasant passages as she waited table or warmed my bed for me with a devil of a brass warming pan, fully larger than herself; and as she was no less pert than she was pretty, she may be said to have given rather better than she took.  I cannot tell why (unless it were for the sake of her saucy eyes), but I made her my confidante, told her I was attached to a young lady in Scotland, and received the encouragement of her sympathy, mingled and connected with a fair amount of rustic wit.  While I slept the down-mail stopped for supper; it chanced that one of the passengers left behind a copy of the
Edinburgh Courant
, and the next morning my pretty chambermaid set the paper before me at breakfast, with the remark that there was some news from my lady-love.  I took it eagerly, hoping to find some further word of our escape, in which I was disappointed; and I was about to lay it down, when my eye fell on a paragraph immediately concerning me.  Faa was in hospital, grievously sick, and warrants were out for the arrest of Sim and Candlish.  These two men had shown themselves very loyal to me.  This trouble emerging, the least I could do was to be guided by a similar loyalty to them.  Suppose my visit to my uncle crowned with some success, and my finances re-established, I determined I should immediately return to Edinburgh, put their case in the hands of a good lawyer, and await events.  So my mind was very lightly made up to what proved a mighty serious matter.  Candlish and Sim were all very well in their way, and I do sincerely trust I should have been at some pains to help them, had there been nothing else.  But in truth my heart and my eyes were set on quite another matter, and I received the news of their tribulation almost with joy.  That is never a bad wind that blows where we want to go, and you may be sure there was nothing unwelcome in a circumstance that carried me back to Edinburgh and Flora.  From that hour I began to indulge myself with the making of imaginary scenes and interviews, in which I confounded the aunt, flattered Ronald, and now in the witty, now in the sentimental manner, declared my love and received the assurance of its return.  By means of this exercise my resolution daily grew stronger, until at last I had piled together such a mass of obstinacy as it would have taken a cataclysm of nature to subvert.

‘Yes,’ said I to the chambermaid, ‘here is news of my lady-love indeed, and very good news too.’

All that day, in the teeth of a keen winter wind, I hugged myself in my plaid, and it was as though her arms were flung around me.

CHAPTER XII — I FOLLOW A COVERED CART NEARLY TO MY DESTINATION

At last I began to draw near, by reasonable stages, to the neighbourhood of Wakefield; and the name of Mr. Burchell Fenn came to the top in my memory.  This was the gentleman (the reader may remember) who made a trade of forwarding the escape of French prisoners.  How he did so: whether he had a sign-board,
Escapes forwarded
,
apply within
; what he charged for his services, or whether they were gratuitous and charitable, were all matters of which I was at once ignorant and extremely curious.  Thanks to my proficiency in English, and Mr. Romaine’s bank-notes, I was getting on swimmingly without him; but the trouble was that I could not be easy till I had come to the bottom of these mysteries, and it was my difficulty that I knew nothing of him beyond the name.  I knew not his trade beyond that of Forwarder of Escapes — whether he lived in town or country, whether he were rich or poor, nor by what kind of address I was to gain his confidence.  It would have a very bad appearance to go along the highwayside asking after a man of whom I could give so scanty an account; and I should look like a fool, indeed, if I were to present myself at his door and find the police in occupation!  The interest of the conundrum, however, tempted me, and I turned aside from my direct road to pass by Wakefield; kept my ears pricked, as I went, for any mention of his name, and relied for the rest on my good fortune.  If Luck (who must certainly be feminine) favoured me as far as to throw me in the man’s way, I should owe the lady a candle; if not, I could very readily console myself.  In this experimental humour, and with so little to help me, it was a miracle that I should have brought my enterprise to a good end; and there are several saints in the calendar who might be happy to exchange with St. Ives!

I had slept that night in a good inn at Wakefield, made my breakfast by candle-light with the passengers of an up-coach, and set off in a very ill temper with myself and my surroundings.  It was still early; the air raw and cold; the sun low, and soon to disappear under a vast canopy of rain-clouds that had begun to assemble in the north-west, and from that quarter invaded the whole width of the heaven.  Already the rain fell in crystal rods; already the whole face of the country sounded with the discharge of drains and ditches; and I looked forward to a day of downpour and the hell of wet clothes, in which particular I am as dainty as a cat.  At a corner of the road, and by the last glint of the drowning sun, I spied a covered cart, of a kind that I thought I had never seen before, preceding me at the foot’s pace of jaded horses.  Anything is interesting to a pedestrian that can help him to forget the miseries of a day of rain; and I bettered my pace and gradually overtook the vehicle.

The nearer I came, the more it puzzled me.  It was much such a cart as I am told the calico printers use, mounted on two wheels, and furnished with a seat in front for the driver.  The interior closed with a door, and was of a bigness to contain a good load of calico, or (at a pinch and if it were necessary) four or five persons.  But, indeed, if human beings were meant to travel there, they had my pity!  They must travel in the dark, for there was no sign of a window; and they would be shaken all the way like a phial of doctor’s stuff, for the cart was not only ungainly to look at — it was besides very imperfectly balanced on the one pair of wheels, and pitched unconscionably.  Altogether, if I had any glancing idea that the cart was really a carriage, I had soon dismissed it; but I was still inquisitive as to what it should contain, and where it had come from.  Wheels and horses were splashed with many different colours of mud, as though they had come far and across a considerable diversity of country.  The driver continually and vainly plied his whip.  It seemed to follow they had made a long, perhaps an all-night, stage; and that the driver, at that early hour of a little after eight in the morning, already felt himself belated.  I looked for the name of the proprietor on the shaft, and started outright.  Fortune had favoured the careless: it was Burchell Fenn!

‘A wet morning, my man,’ said I.

The driver, a loutish fellow, shock-headed and turnip-faced, returned not a word to my salutation, but savagely flogged his horses.  The tired animals, who could scarce put the one foot before the other, paid no attention to his cruelty; and I continued without effort to maintain my position alongside, smiling to myself at the futility of his attempts, and at the same time pricked with curiosity as to why he made them.  I made no such formidable a figure as that a man should flee when I accosted him; and my conscience not being entirely clear, I was more accustomed to be uneasy myself than to see others timid.  Presently he desisted, and put back his whip in the holster with the air of a man vanquished.

‘So you would run away from me?’ said I.  ‘Come, come, that’s not English.’

‘Beg pardon, master: no offence meant,’ he said, touching his hat.

‘And none taken!’ cried I.  ‘All I desire is a little gaiety by the way.’

I understood him to say he didn’t ‘take with gaiety.’

‘Then I will try you with something else,’ said I.  ‘Oh, I can be all things to all men, like the apostle!  I dare to say I have travelled with heavier fellows than you in my time, and done famously well with them.  Are you going home?’

‘Yes, I’m a goin’ home, I am,’ he said.

‘A very fortunate circumstance for me!’ said I.  ‘At this rate we shall see a good deal of each other, going the same way; and, now I come to think of it, why should you not give me a cast?  There is room beside you on the bench.’

With a sudden snatch, he carried the cart two yards into the roadway.  The horses plunged and came to a stop.  ‘No, you don’t!’ he said, menacing me with the whip.  ‘None o’ that with me.’

‘None of what?’ said I.  ‘I asked you for a lift, but I have no idea of taking one by force.’

‘Well, I’ve got to take care of the cart and ‘orses, I have,’ says he.  ‘I don’t take up with no runagate vagabones, you see, else.’

‘I ought to thank you for your touching confidence,’ said I, approaching carelessly nearer as I spoke.  ‘But I admit the road is solitary hereabouts, and no doubt an accident soon happens.  Little fear of anything of the kind with you!  I like you for it, like your prudence, like that pastoral shyness of disposition.  But why not put it out of my power to hurt?  Why not open the door and bestow me here in the box, or whatever you please to call it?’ And I laid my hand demonstratively on the body of the cart.