'I beg your pardon, sir,' said I.  'I have been unjust.  I did not
appreciate my danger.'

'I think you never do,' said he.

'But yet surely that public scene--' I began.

'It was madness.  I quite agree with you,' Mr. Romaine interrupted.
'But it was your uncle's orders, Mr. Anne, and what could I do?
Tell him you were the murderer of Goguelat?  I think not.'

'No, sure!' said I.  'That would but have been to make the trouble
thicker.  We were certainly in a very ill posture.'

'You do not yet appreciate how grave it was,' he replied.  'It was
necessary for you that your cousin should go, and go at once.  You
yourself had to leave to-night under cover of darkness, and how
could you have done that with the Viscount in the next room?  He
must go, then; he must leave without delay.  And that was the
difficulty.'

'Pardon me, Mr. Romaine, but could not my uncle have bidden him
go?' I asked.

'Why, I see I must tell you that this is not so simple as it
sounds,' he replied.  'You say this is your uncle's house, and so
it is.  But to all effects and purposes it is your cousin's also.
He has rooms here; has had them coming on for thirty years now, and
they are filled with a prodigious accumulation of trash--stays, I
dare say, and powder-puffs, and such effeminate idiocy--to which
none could dispute his title, even suppose any one wanted to.  We
had a perfect right to bid him go, and he had a perfect right to
reply, "Yes, I will go, but not without my stays and cravats.  I
must first get together the nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine chestsfull
of insufferable rubbish, that I have spent the last thirty years
collecting--and may very well spend the next thirty hours a-packing
of."  And what should we have said to that?'

'By way of repartee?' I asked.  'Two tall footmen and a pair of
crabtree cudgels, I suggest.'

'The Lord deliver me from the wisdom of laymen!' cried Romaine.
'Put myself in the wrong at the beginning of a lawsuit?  No,
indeed!  There was but one thing to do, and I did it, and burned my
last cartridge in the doing of it.  I stunned him.  And it gave us
three hours, by which we should make haste to profit; for if there
is one thing sure, it is that he will be up to time again to-morrow
in the morning.'

'Well,' said I, 'I own myself an idiot.  Well do they say, an old
soldier, an old innocent!  For I guessed nothing of all this.'

'And, guessing it, have you the same objections to leave England?'
he inquired.

'The same,' said I.

'It is indispensable,' he objected.

'And it cannot be,' I replied.  'Reason has nothing to say in the
matter; and I must not let you squander any of yours.  It will be
enough to tell you this is an affair of the heart.'

'Is it even so?' quoth Romaine, nodding his head.  'And I might
have been sure of it.  Place them in a hospital, put them in a jail
in yellow overalls, do what you will, young Jessamy finds young
Jenny.  O, have it your own way; I am too old a hand to argue with
young gentlemen who choose to fancy themselves in love; I have too
much experience, thank you.  Only, be sure that you appreciate what
you risk:  the prison, the dock, the gallows, and the halter--
terribly vulgar circumstances, my young friend; grim, sordid,
earnest; no poetry in that!'

'And there I am warned,' I returned gaily.  'No man could be warned
more finely or with a greater eloquence.  And I am of the same
opinion still.  Until I have again seen that lady, nothing shall
induce me to quit Great Britain.  I have besides--'

And here I came to a full stop.  It was upon my tongue to have told
him the story of the drovers, but at the first word of it my voice
died in my throat.  There might be a limit to the lawyer's
toleration, I reflected.  I had not been so long in Britain
altogether; for the most part of that time I had been by the heels
in limbo in Edinburgh Castle; and already I had confessed to
killing one man with a pair of scissors; and now I was to go on and
plead guilty to having settled another with a holly stick!  A wave
of discretion went over me as cold and as deep as the sea.

'In short, sir, this is a matter of feeling,' I concluded, 'and
nothing will prevent my going to Edinburgh.'

If I had fired a pistol in his ear he could not have been more
startled.

'To Edinburgh?' he repeated.  'Edinburgh? where the very paving-
stones know you!'

'Then is the murder out!' said I.  'But, Mr. Romaine, is there not
sometimes safety in boldness?  Is it not a common-place of strategy
to get where the enemy least expects you?  And where would he
expect me less?'

'Faith, there is something in that, too!' cried the lawyer.  'Ay,
certainly, a great deal in that.  All the witnesses drowned but
one, and he safe in prison; you yourself changed beyond
recognition--let us hope--and walking the streets of the very town
you have illustrated by your--well, your eccentricity!  It is not
badly combined, indeed!'

'You approve it, then?' said I.

'O, approve!' said he; 'there is no question of approval.  There is
only one course which I could approve, and that were to escape to
France instanter.'

'You do not wholly disapprove, at least?' I substituted.

'Not wholly; and it would not matter if I did,' he replied.  'Go
your own way; you are beyond argument.  And I am not sure that you
will run more danger by that course than by any other.  Give the
servants time to get to bed and fall asleep, then take a country
cross-road and walk, as the rhyme has it, like blazes all night.
In the morning take a chaise or take the mail at pleasure, and
continue your journey with all the decorum and reserve of which you
shall be found capable.'

'I am taking the picture in,' I said.  'Give me time.  'Tis the
tout ensemble I must see:  the whole as opposed to the details.'

'Mountebank!' he murmured.

'Yes, I have it now; and I see myself with a servant, and that
servant is Rowley,' said I.

'So as to have one more link with your uncle?' suggested the
lawyer.  'Very judicious!'

'And, pardon me, but that is what it is,' I exclaimed.  'Judicious
is the word.  I am not making a deception fit to last for thirty
years; I do not found a palace in the living granite for the night.
This is a shelter tent--a flying picture--seen, admired, and gone
again in the wink of an eye.  What is wanted, in short, is a
trompe-l'oeil that shall be good enough for twelve hours at an inn:
is it not so?'

'It is, and the objection holds.  Rowley is but another danger,'
said Romaine.

'Rowley,' said I, 'will pass as a servant from a distance--as a
creature seen poised on the dicky of a bowling chaise.  He will
pass at hand as a smart, civil fellow one meets in the inn
corridor, and looks back at, and asks, and is told, "Gentleman's
servant in Number 4."  He will pass, in fact, all round, except
with his personal friends!  My dear sir, pray what do you expect?
Of course if we meet my cousin, or if we meet anybody who took part
in the judicious exhibition of this evening, we are lost; and who's
denying it?  To every disguise, however good and safe, there is
always the weak point; you must always take (let us say--and to
take a simile from your own waistcoat pocket) a snuff box-full of
risk.  You'll get it just as small with Rowley as with anybody
else.  And the long and short of it is, the lad's honest, he likes
me, I trust him; he is my servant, or nobody.'

'He might not accept,' said Romaine.

'I bet you a thousand pounds he does!' cried I.  'But no matter;
all you have to do is to send him out to-night on this cross-
country business, and leave the thing to me.  I tell you, he will
be my servant, and I tell you, he will do well.'

I had crossed the room, and was already overhauling my wardrobe as
I spoke.

'Well,' concluded the lawyer, with a shrug, 'one risk with another:
a la guerre comme a la guerre, as you would say.  Let the brat come
and be useful, at least.'  And he was about to ring the bell, when
his eye was caught by my researches in the wardrobe.  'Do not fall
in love with these coats, waistcoats, cravats, and other panoply
and accoutrements by which you are now surrounded.  You must not
run the post as a dandy.  It is not the fashion, even.'

'You are pleased to be facetious, sir,' said I; 'and not according
to knowledge.  These clothes are my life, they are my disguise; and
since I can take but 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 detonne; 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 all this romantic business hung, I was simply
idolised from that moment; and he would rather have sacrificed his
hand than surrendered the privilege of serving me.

We arranged the terms of our campaign, trudging amicably in the
snow, which now, with the approach of morning, began to fall to
purpose.  I chose the name of Ramornie, I imagine from its likeness
to Romaine; Rowley, from an irresistible conversion of ideas, I
dubbed Gammon.  His distress was laughable to witness:  his own
choice of an unassuming nickname had been Claude Duval!  We settled
our procedure at the various inns where we should alight, rehearsed
our little manners like a piece of drill until it seemed impossible
we should ever be taken unprepared; and in all these dispositions,
you maybe sure the despatch-box was not forgotten.  Who was to pick
it up, who was to set it down, who was to remain beside it, who was
to sleep with it--there was no contingency omitted, all was gone
into with the thoroughness of a drill-sergeant on the one hand and
a child with a new plaything on the other.

'I say, wouldn't it look queer if you and me was to come to the
post-house with all this luggage?' said Rowley.

'I dare say,' I replied.  'But what else is to be done?'

'Well, now, sir--you hear me,' says Rowley.  'I think it would look
more natural-like if you was to come to the post-house alone, and
with nothing in your 'ands--more like a gentleman, you know.  And
you might say that your servant and baggage was a-waiting for you
up the road.  I think I could manage, somehow, to make a shift with
all them dratted things--leastways if you was to give me a 'and up
with them at the start.'

'And I would see you far enough before I allowed you to try, Mr.
Rowley!' I cried.  'Why, you would be quite defenceless!  A footpad
that was an infant child could rob you.  And I should probably come
driving by to find you in a ditch with your throat cut.  But there
is something in your idea, for all that; and I propose we put it in
execution no farther forward than the next corner of a lane.'

Accordingly, instead of continuing to aim for Aylesbury, we headed
by cross-roads for some point to the northward of it, whither I
might assist Rowley with the baggage, and where I might leave him
to await my return in the post-chaise.

It was snowing to purpose, the country all white, and ourselves
walking snowdrifts, when the first glimmer of the morning showed us
an inn upon the highwayside.  Some distance off, under the shelter
of a corner of the road and a clump of trees, I loaded Rowley with
the whole of our possessions, and watched him till he staggered in
safety into the doors of the Green Dragon, which was the sign of
the house.  Thence I walked briskly into Aylesbury, rejoicing in my
freedom and the causeless good spirits that belong to a snowy
morning; though, to be sure, long before I had arrived the snow had
again ceased to fall, and the eaves of Aylesbury were smoking in
the level sun.  There was an accumulation of gigs and chaises in
the yard, and a great bustle going forward in the coffee-room and
about the doors of the inn.  At these evidences of so much travel
on the road I was seized with a misgiving lest it should be
impossible to get horses, and I should be detained in the
precarious neighbourhood of my cousin.  Hungry as I was, I made my
way first of all to the postmaster, where he stood--a big,
athletic, horsey-looking man, blowing into a key in the corner of
the yard.

On my making my modest request, he awoke from his indifference into
what seemed passion.

'A po'-shay and 'osses!' he cried.  'Do I look as if I 'ad a po'-
shay and 'osses?  Damn me, if I 'ave such a thing on the premises.
I don't MAKE 'osses and chaises--I 'IRE 'em.  You might be God
Almighty!' said he; and instantly, as if he had observed me for the
first time, he broke off, and lowered his voice into the
confidential.  'Why, now that I see you are a gentleman,' said he,
'I'll tell you what!  If you like to BUY, I have the article to fit
you.  Second-'and shay by Lycett, of London.  Latest style; good as
new.  Superior fittin's, net on the roof, baggage platform, pistol
'olsters--the most com-plete and the most gen-teel turn-out I ever
see!  The 'ole for seventy-five pound!  It's as good as givin' her
away!'

'Do you propose I should trundle it myself, like a hawker's
barrow?' said I.  'Why, my good man, if I had to stop here, anyway,
I should prefer to buy a house and garden!'

'Come and look at her!' he cried; and, with the word, links his arm
in mine and carries me to the outhouse where the chaise was on
view.

It was just the sort of chaise that I had dreamed of for my
purpose:  eminently rich, inconspicuous, and genteel; for, though I
thought the postmaster no great authority, I was bound to agree
with him so far.  The body was painted a dark claret, and the
wheels an invisible green.  The lamp and glasses were bright as
silver; and the whole equipage had an air of privacy and reserve
that seemed to repel inquiry and disarm suspicion.  With a servant
like Rowley, and a chaise like this, I felt that I could go from
the Land's End to John o' Groat's House amid a population of bowing
ostlers.  And I suppose I betrayed in my manner the degree in which
the bargain tempted me.

'Come,' cried the postmaster--'I'll make it seventy, to oblige a
friend!'

'The point is:  the horses,' said I.

'Well,' said he, consulting his watch, 'it's now gone the 'alf
after eight.  What time do you want her at the door?'

'Horses and all?' said I.

''Osses and all!' says he.  'One good turn deserves another.  You
give me seventy pound for the shay, and I'll 'oss it for you.  I
told you I didn't MAKE 'osses; but I CAN make 'em, to oblige a
friend.'

What would you have?  It was not the wisest thing in the world to
buy a chaise within a dozen miles of my uncle's house; but in this
way I got my horses for the next stage.  And by any other it
appeared that I should have to wait.  Accordingly I paid the money
down--perhaps twenty pounds too much, though it was certainly a
well-made and well-appointed vehicle--ordered it round in half an
hour, and proceeded to refresh myself with breakfast.

The table to which I sat down occupied the recess of a bay-window,
and commanded a view of the front of the inn, where I continued to
be amused by the successive departures of travellers--the fussy and
the offhand, the niggardly and the lavish--all exhibiting their
different characters in that diagnostic moment of the farewell:
some escorted to the stirrup or the chaise door by the chamberlain,
the chambermaids and the waiters almost in a body, others moving
off under a cloud, without human countenance.  In the course of
this I became interested in one for whom this ovation began to
assume the proportions of a triumph; not only the under-servants,
but the barmaid, the landlady, and my friend the postmaster
himself, crowding about the steps to speed his departure.  I was
aware, at the same time, of a good deal of merriment, as though the
traveller were a man of a ready wit, and not too dignified to air
it in that society.  I leaned forward with a lively curiosity; and
the next moment I had blotted myself behind the teapot.  The
popular traveller had turned to wave a farewell; and behold! he was
no other than my cousin Alain.  It was a change of the sharpest
from the angry, pallid man I had seen at Amersham Place.  Ruddy to
a fault, illuminated with vintages, crowned with his curls like
Bacchus, he now stood before me for an instant, the perfect master
of himself, smiling with airs of conscious popularity and
insufferable condescension.  He reminded me at once of a royal
duke, or an actor turned a little elderly, and of a blatant bagman
who should have been the illegitimate son of a gentleman.  A moment
after he was gliding noiselessly on the road to London.

I breathed again.  I recognised, with heartfelt gratitude, how
lucky I had been to go in by the stable-yard instead of the
hostelry door, and what a fine occasion of meeting my cousin I had
lost by the purchase of the claret-coloured chaise!  The next
moment I remembered that there was a waiter present.  No doubt but
he must have observed me when I crouched behind the breakfast
equipage; no doubt but he must have commented on this unusual and
undignified behaviour; and it was essential that I should do
something to remove the impression.

'Waiter!' said I, 'that was the nephew of Count Carwell that just
drove off, wasn't it?'

'Yes, sir:  Viscount Carwell we calls him,' he replied.

'Ah, I thought as much,' said I.  'Well, well, damn all these
Frenchmen, say I!'

'You may say so indeed, sir,' said the waiter.  'They ain't not to
say in the same field with our 'ome-raised gentry.'

'Nasty tempers?' I suggested.

'Beas'ly temper, sir, the Viscount 'ave,' said the waiter with
feeling.  'Why, no longer agone than this morning, he was sitting
breakfasting and reading in his paper.  I suppose, sir, he come on
some pilitical information, or it might be about 'orses, but he
raps his 'and upon the table sudden and calls for curacoa.  It gave
me quite a turn, it did; he did it that sudden and 'ard.  Now, sir,
that may be manners in France, but hall I can say is, that I'm not
used to it.'

'Reading the paper, was he?' said I.  'What paper, eh?'

'Here it is, sir,' exclaimed the waiter.  'Seems like as if he'd
dropped it.'

And picking it off the floor he presented it to me.

I may say that I was quite prepared, that I already knew what to
expect; but at sight of the cold print my heart stopped beating.
There it was:  the fulfilment of Romaine's apprehension was before
me; the paper was laid open at the capture of Clausel.  I felt as
if I could take a little curacoa myself, but on second thoughts
called for brandy.  It was badly wanted; and suddenly I observed
the waiter's eye to sparkle, as it were, with some recognition;
made certain he had remarked the resemblance between me and Alain;
and became aware--as by a revelation--of the fool's part I had been
playing.  For I had now managed to put my identification beyond a
doubt, if Alain should choose to make his inquiries at Aylesbury;
and, as if that were not enough, I had added, at an expense of
seventy pounds, a clue by which he might follow me through the
length and breadth of England, in the shape of the claret-coloured
chaise!  That elegant equipage (which I began to regard as little
better than a claret-coloured ante-room to the hangman's cart)
coming presently to the door, I left my breakfast in the middle and
departed; posting to the north as diligently as my cousin Alain was
posting to the south, and putting my trust (such as it was) in an
opposite direction and equal speed.



CHAPTER XXII--CHARACTER AND ACQUIREMENTS OF MR.  ROWLEY



I am not certain that I had ever really appreciated before that
hour the extreme peril of the adventure on which I was embarked.
The sight of my cousin, the look of his face--so handsome, so
jovial at the first sight, and branded with so much malignity as
you saw it on the second--with his hyperbolical curls in order,
with his neckcloth tied as if for the conquests of love, setting
forth (as I had no doubt in the world he was doing) to clap the Bow
Street runners on my trail, and cover England with handbills, each
dangerous as a loaded musket, convinced me for the first time that
the affair was no less serious than death.  I believe it came to a
near touch whether I should not turn the horses' heads at the next
stage and make directly for the coast.  But I was now in the
position of a man who should have thrown his gage into the den of
lions; or, better still, like one who should have quarrelled
overnight under the influence of wine, and now, at daylight, in a
cold winter's morning, and humbly sober, must make good his words.
It is not that I thought any the less, or any the less warmly, of
Flora.  But, as I smoked a grim segar that morning in a corner of
the chaise, no doubt I considered, in the first place, that the
letter-post had been invented, and admitted privately to myself, in
the second, that it would have been highly possible to write her on
a piece of paper, seal it, and send it skimming by the mail,
instead of going personally into these egregious dangers, and
through a country that I beheld crowded with gibbets and Bow Street
officers.  As for Sim and Candlish, I doubt if they crossed my
mind.

At the Green Dragon Rowley was waiting on the doorsteps with the
luggage, and really was bursting with unpalatable conversation.

'Who do you think we've 'ad 'ere, sir?' he began breathlessly, as
the chaise drove off.  'Red Breasts'; and he nodded his head
portentously.

'Red Breasts?' I repeated, for I stupidly did not understand at the
moment an expression I had often heard.

'Ah!' said he.  'Red weskits.  Runners.  Bow Street runners.  Two
on' em, and one was Lavender himself!  I hear the other say quite
plain, "Now, Mr. Lavender, IF you're ready."  They was breakfasting
as nigh me as I am to that postboy.  They're all right; they ain't
after us.  It's a forger; and I didn't send them off on a false
scent--O no!  I thought there was no use in having them over our
way; so I give them "very valuable information," Mr. Lavender said,
and tipped me a tizzy for myself; and they're off to Luton.  They
showed me the 'andcuffs, too--the other one did--and he clicked the
dratted things on my wrist; and I tell you, I believe I nearly went
off in a swound!  There's something so beastly in the feel of them!
Begging your pardon, Mr. Anne,' he added, with one of his delicious
changes from the character of the confidential schoolboy into that
of the trained, respectful servant.

Well, I must not be proud!  I cannot say I found the subject of
handcuffs to my fancy; and it was with more asperity than was
needful that I reproved him for the slip about the name.

'Yes, Mr. Ramornie,' says he, touching his hat.  'Begging your
pardon, Mr. Ramornie.  But I've been very piticular, sir, up to
now; and you may trust me to be very piticular in the future.  It
were only a slip, sir.'

'My good boy,' said I, with the most imposing severity, 'there must
be no slips.  Be so good as to remember that my life is at stake.'

I did not embrace the occasion of telling him how many I had made
myself.  It is my principle that an officer must never be wrong.  I
have seen two divisions beating their brains out for a fortnight
against a worthless and quite impregnable castle in a pass:  I knew
we were only doing it for discipline, because the General had said
so at first, and had not yet found any way out of his own words;
and I highly admired his force of character, and throughout these
operations thought my life exposed in a very good cause.  With
fools and children, which included Rowley, the necessity was even
greater.  I proposed to myself to be infallible; and even when he
expressed some wonder at the purchase of the claret-coloured
chaise, I put him promptly in his place.  In our situation, I told
him, everything had to be sacrificed to appearances; doubtless, in
a hired chaise, we should have had more freedom, but look at the
dignity!  I was so positive, that I had sometimes almost convinced
myself.  Not for long, you may be certain!  This detestable
conveyance always appeared to me to be laden with Bow Street
officers, and to have a placard upon the back of it publishing my
name and crimes.  If I had paid seventy pounds to get the thing, I
should not have stuck at seven hundred to be safely rid of it.

And if the chaise was a danger, what an anxiety was the despatch-
box and its golden cargo!  I had never had a care but to draw my
pay and spend it; I had lived happily in the regiment, as in my
father's house, fed by the great Emperor's commissariat as by
ubiquitous doves of Elijah--or, my faith! if anything went wrong
with the commissariat, helping myself with the best grace in the
world from the next peasant!  And now I began to feel at the same
time the burthen of riches and the fear of destitution.  There were
ten thousand pounds in the despatch-box, but I reckoned in French
money, and had two hundred and fifty thousand agonies; I kept it
under my hand all day, I dreamed of it at night.  In the inns, I
was afraid to go to dinner and afraid to go to sleep.  When I
walked up a hill I durst not leave the doors of the claret-coloured
chaise.  Sometimes I would change the disposition of the funds:
there were days when I carried as much as five or six thousand
pounds on my own person, and only the residue continued to voyage
in the treasure-chest--days when I bulked all over like my cousin,
crackled to a touch with bank paper, and had my pockets weighed to
bursting-point with sovereigns.  And there were other days when I
wearied of the thing--or grew ashamed of it--and put all the money
back where it had come from:  there let it take its chance, like
better people!  In short, I set Rowley a poor example of
consistency, and in philosophy, none at all.

Little he cared!  All was one to him so long as he was amused, and
I never knew any one amused more easily.  He was thrillingly
interested in life, travel, and his own melodramatic position.  All
day he would be looking from the chaise windows with ebullitions of
gratified curiosity, that were sometimes justified and sometimes
not, and that (taken altogether) it occasionally wearied me to be
obliged to share.  I can look at horses, and I can look at trees
too, although not fond of it.  But why should I look at a lame
horse, or a tree that was like the letter Y?  What exhilaration
could I feel in viewing a cottage that was the same colour as 'the
second from the miller's' in some place where I had never been, and
of which I had not previously heard?  I am ashamed to complain, but
there were moments when my juvenile and confidential friend weighed
heavy on my hands.  His cackle was indeed almost continuous, but it
was never unamiable.  He showed an amiable curiosity when he was
asking questions; an amiable guilelessness when he was conferring
information.  And both he did largely.  I am in a position to write
the biographies of Mr. Rowley, Mr. Rowley's father and mother, his
Aunt Eliza, and the miller's dog; and nothing but pity for the
reader, and some misgivings as to the law of copyright, prevail on
me to withhold them.

A general design to mould himself upon my example became early
apparent, and I had not the heart to check it.  He began to mimic
my carriage; he acquired, with servile accuracy, a little manner I
had of shrugging the shoulders; and I may say it was by observing
it in him that I first discovered it in myself.  One day it came
out by chance that I was of the Catholic religion.  He became
plunged in thought, at which I was gently glad.  Then suddenly -

'Odd-rabbit it!  I'll be Catholic too!' he broke out.  'You must
teach me it, Mr. Anne--I mean, Ramornie.'

I dissuaded him:  alleging that he would find me very imperfectly
informed as to the grounds and doctrines of the Church, and that,
after all, in the matter of religions, it was a very poor idea to
change.  'Of course, my Church is the best,' said I; 'but that is
not the reason why I belong to it:  I belong to it because it was
the faith of my house.  I wish to take my chances with my own
people, and so should you.  If it is a question of going to hell,
go to hell like a gentleman with your ancestors.'

'Well, it wasn't that,' he admitted.  'I don't know that I was
exactly thinking of hell.  Then there's the inquisition, too.
That's rather a cawker, you know.'

'And I don't believe you were thinking of anything in the world,'
said I--which put a period to his respectable conversion.

He consoled himself by playing for awhile on a cheap flageolet,
which was one of his diversions, and to which I owed many intervals
of peace.  When he first produced it, in the joints, from his
pocket, he had the duplicity to ask me if I played upon it.  I
answered, no; and he put the instrument away with a sigh and the
remark that he had thought I might.  For some while he resisted the
unspeakable temptation, his fingers visibly itching and twittering
about his pocket, even his interest in the landscape and in
sporadic anecdote entirely lost.  Presently the pipe was in his
hands again; he fitted, unfitted, refitted, and played upon it in
dumb show for some time.

'I play it myself a little,' says he.

'Do you?' said I, and yawned.

And then he broke down.

'Mr. Ramornie, if you please, would it disturb you, sir, if I was
to play a chune?' he pleaded.  And from that hour, the tootling of
the flageolet cheered our way.

He was particularly keen on the details of battles, single combats,
incidents of scouting parties, and the like.  These he would make
haste to cap with some of the exploits of Wallace, the only hero
with whom he had the least acquaintance.  His enthusiasm was
genuine and pretty.  When he learned we were going to Scotland,
'Well, then,' he broke out, 'I'll see where Wallace lived!'  And
presently after, he fell to moralising.  'It's a strange thing,
sir,' he began, 'that I seem somehow to have always the wrong sow
by the ear.  I'm English after all, and I glory in it.  My eye!
don't I, though!  Let some of your Frenchies come over here to
invade, and you'll see whether or not!  Oh, yes, I'm English to the
backbone, I am.  And yet look at me!  I got hold of this 'ere
William Wallace and took to him right off; I never heard of such a
man before!  And then you came along, and I took to you.  And both
the two of you were my born enemies!  I--I beg your pardon, Mr.
Ramornie, but would you mind it very much if you didn't go for to
do anything against England'--he brought the word out suddenly,
like something hot--'when I was along of you?'

I was more affected than I can tell.

'Rowley,' I said, 'you need have no fear.  By how much I love my
own honour, by so much I will take care to protect yours.  We are
but fraternising at the outposts, as soldiers do.  When the bugle
calls, my boy, we must face each other, one for England, one for
France, and may God defend the right!'

So I spoke at the moment; but for all my brave airs, the boy had
wounded me in a vital quarter.  His words continued to ring in my
hearing.  There was no remission all day of my remorseful thoughts;
and that night (which we lay at Lichfield, I believe) there was no
sleep for me in my bed.  I put out the candle and lay down with a
good resolution; and in a moment all was light about me like a
theatre, and I saw myself upon the stage of it playing ignoble
parts.  I remembered France and my Emperor, now depending on the
arbitrament of war, bent down, fighting on their knees and with
their teeth against so many and such various assailants.  And I
burned with shame to be here in England, cherishing an English
fortune, pursuing an English mistress, and not there, to handle a
musket in my native fields, and to manure them with my body if I
fell.  I remembered that I belonged to France.  All my fathers had
fought for her, and some had died; the voice in my throat, the
sight of my eyes, the tears that now sprang there, the whole man of
me, was fashioned of French earth and born of a French mother; I
had been tended and caressed by a succession of the daughters of
France, the fairest, the most ill-starred; and I had fought and
conquered shoulder to shoulder with her sons.  A soldier, a noble,
of the proudest and bravest race in Europe, it had been left to the
prattle of a hobbledehoy lackey in an English chaise to recall me
to the consciousness of duty.

When I saw how it was I did not lose time in indecision.  The old
classical conflict of love and honour being once fairly before me,
it did not cost me a thought.  I was a Saint-Yves de Keroual; and I
decided to strike off on the morrow for Wakefield and Burchell
Fenn, and embark, as soon as it should be morally possible, for the
succour of my downtrodden fatherland and my beleaguered Emperor.
Pursuant on this resolve, I leaped from bed, made a light, and as
the watchman was crying half-past two in the dark streets of
Lichfield, sat down to pen a letter of farewell to Flora.  And
then--whether it was the sudden chill of the night, whether it came
by association of ideas from the remembrance of Swanston Cottage I
know not, but there appeared before me--to the barking of sheep-
dogs--a couple of snuffy and shambling figures, each wrapped in a
plaid, each armed with a rude staff; and I was immediately bowed
down to have forgotten them so long, and of late to have thought of
them so cavalierly.

Sure enough there was my errand!  As a private person I was neither
French nor English; I was something else first:  a loyal gentleman,
an honest man.  Sim and Candlish must not be left to pay the
penalty of my unfortunate blow.  They held my honour tacitly
pledged to succour them; and it is a sort of stoical refinement
entirely foreign to my nature to set the political obligation above
the personal and private.  If France fell in the interval for the
lack of Anne de St.-Yves, fall she must!  But I was both surprised
and humiliated to have had so plain a duty bound upon me for so
long--and for so long to have neglected and forgotten it.  I think
any brave man will understand me when I say that I went to bed and
to sleep with a conscience very much relieved, and woke again in
the morning with a light heart.  The very danger of the enterprise
reassured me:  to save Sim and Candlish (suppose the worst to come
to the worst) it would be necessary for me to declare myself in a
court of justice, with consequences which I did not dare to dwell
upon; it could never be said that I had chosen the cheap and the
easy--only that in a very perplexing competition of duties I had
risked my life for the most immediate.

We resumed the journey with more diligence:  thenceforward posted
day and night; did not halt beyond what was necessary for meals;
and the postillions were excited by gratuities, after the habit of
my cousin Alain.  For twopence I could have gone farther and taken
four horses; so extreme was my haste, running as I was before the
terrors of an awakened conscience.  But I feared to be conspicuous.
Even as it was, we attracted only too much attention, with our pair
and that white elephant, the seventy-pounds-worth of claret-
coloured chaise.

Meanwhile I was ashamed to look Rowley in the face.  The young
shaver had contrived to put me wholly in the wrong; he had cost me
a night's rest and a severe and healthful humiliation; and I was
grateful and embarrassed in his society.  This would never do; it
was contrary to all my ideas of discipline; if the officer has to
blush before the private, or the master before the servant, nothing
is left to hope for but discharge or death.  I hit upon the idea of
teaching him French; and accordingly, from Lichfield, I became the
distracted master, and he the scholar--how shall I say?
indefatigable, but uninspired.  His interest never flagged.  He
would hear the same word twenty times with profound refreshment,
mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it again with
magical celerity.  Say it happened to be STIRRUP.  'No, I don't
seem to remember that word, Mr. Anne,' he would say:  'it don't
seem to stick to me, that word don't.'  And then, when I had told
it him again, 'Etrier!' he would cry.  'To be sure!  I had it on
the tip of my tongue.  Eterier!' (going wrong already, as if by a
fatal instinct).  'What will I remember it by, now?  Why, INTERIOR,
to be sure!  I'll remember it by its being something that ain't in
the interior of a horse.'  And when next I had occasion to ask him
the French for stirrup, it was a toss-up whether he had forgotten
all about it, or gave me EXTERIOR for an answer.  He was never a
hair discouraged.  He seemed to consider that he was covering the
ground at a normal rate.  He came up smiling day after day.  'Now,
sir, shall we do our French?' he would say; and I would put
questions, and elicit copious commentary and explanation, but never
the shadow of an answer.  My hands fell to my sides; I could have
wept to hear him.  When I reflected that he had as yet learned
nothing, and what a vast deal more there was for him to learn, the
period of these lessons seemed to unroll before me vast as
eternity, and I saw myself a teacher of a hundred, and Rowley a
pupil of ninety, still hammering on the rudiments!  The wretched
boy, I should say, was quite unspoiled by the inevitable
familiarities of the journey.  He turned out at each stage the pink
of serving-lads, deft, civil, prompt, attentive, touching his hat
like an automaton, raising the status of Mr. Ramornie in the eyes
of all the inn by his smiling service, and seeming capable of
anything in the world but the one thing I had chosen--learning
French!



CHAPTER XXIII--THE ADVENTURE OF THE RUNAWAY COUPLE



The country had for some time back been changing in character.  By
a thousand indications I could judge that I was again drawing near
to Scotland.  I saw it written in the face of the hills, in the
growth of the trees, and in the glint of the waterbrooks that kept
the high-road company.  It might have occurred to me, also, that I
was, at the same time, approaching a place of some fame in Britain-
-Gretna Green.  Over these same leagues of road--which Rowley and I
now traversed in the claret-coloured chaise, to the note of the
flageolet and the French lesson--how many pairs of lovers had gone
bowling northwards to the music of sixteen scampering horseshoes;
and how many irate persons, parents, uncles, guardians, evicted
rivals, had come tearing after, clapping the frequent red face to
the chaise-window, lavishly shedding their gold about the post-
houses, sedulously loading and re-loading, as they went, their
avenging pistols!  But I doubt if I had thought of it at all,
before a wayside hazard swept me into the thick of an adventure of
this nature; and I found myself playing providence with other
people's lives, to my own admiration at the moment--and
subsequently to my own brief but passionate regret.