of reproach, and such warmth of communicative cordiality as left me
speechless.  I watched her instead till her hens' milk was ready.

'Now,' said she, 'taste that.'

I did so, and swore it was nectar.  She collected her eggs and crouched
in front of me to watch me eat.  There was about this tall young lady at
the moment an air of motherliness delicious to behold.  I am like the
English general, and to this day I still wonder at my moderation.

'What sort of clothes will you be wanting?' said she.

'The clothes of a gentleman,' said I.  'Right or wrong, I think it is the
part I am best qualified to play.  Mr. St. Ives (for that's to be my name
upon the journey) I conceive as rather a theatrical figure, and his
make-up should be to match.'

'And yet there is a difficulty,' said she.  'If you got coarse clothes
the fit would hardly matter.  But the clothes of a fine gentleman--O, it
is absolutely necessary that these should fit!  And above all, with
your'--she paused a moment--'to our ideas somewhat noticeable manners.'

'Alas for my poor manners!' said I.  'But my dear friend Flora, these
little noticeabilities are just what mankind has to suffer under.
Yourself, you see, you're very noticeable even when you come in a crowd
to visit poor prisoners in the Castle.'

I was afraid I should frighten my good angel visitant away, and without
the smallest breath of pause went on to add a few directions as to stuffs
and colours.

She opened big eyes upon me.  'O, Mr. St. Ives!' she cried--'if that is
to be your name--I do not say they would not be becoming; but for a
journey, do you think they would be wise?  I am afraid'--she gave a
pretty break of laughter--'I am afraid they would be daft-like!'

'Well, and am I not daft?' I asked her.

'I do begin to think you are,' said she.

'There it is, then!' said I.  'I have been long enough a figure of fun.
Can you not feel with me that perhaps the bitterest thing in this
captivity has been the clothes?  Make me a captive--bind me with chains
if you like--but let me be still myself.  You do not know what it is to
be a walking travesty--among foes,' I added bitterly.

'O, but you are too unjust!' she cried.  'You speak as though any one
ever dreamed of laughing at you.  But no one did.  We were all pained to
the heart.  Even my aunt--though sometimes I do think she was not quite
in good taste--you should have seen her and heard her at home!  She took
so much interest.  Every patch in your clothes made us sorry; it should
have been a sister's work.'

'That is what I never had--a sister,' said I.  'But since you say that I
did not make you laugh--'

'O, Mr. St. Ives! never!' she exclaimed.  'Not for one moment.  It was
all too sad.  To see a gentleman--'

'In the clothes of a harlequin, and begging?' I suggested.

'To see a gentleman in distress, and nobly supporting it,' she said.

'And do you not understand, my fair foe,' said I, 'that even if all were
as you say--even if you had thought my travesty were becoming--I should
be only the more anxious, for my sake, for my country's sake, and for the
sake of your kindness, that you should see him whom you have helped as
God meant him to be seen? that you should have something to remember him
by at least more characteristic than a misfitting sulphur-yellow suit,
and half a week's beard?'

'You think a great deal too much of clothes,' she said.  'I am not that
kind of girl.'

'And I am afraid I am that kind of man,' said I.  'But do not think of me
too harshly for that.  I talked just now of something to remember by.  I
have many of them myself, of these beautiful reminders, of these
keepsakes, that I cannot be parted from until I lose memory and life.
Many of them are great things, many of them are high virtues--charity,
mercy, faith.  But some of them are trivial enough.  Miss Flora, do you
remember the day that I first saw you, the day of the strong east wind?
Miss Flora, shall I tell you what you wore?'

We had both risen to our feet, and she had her hand already on the door
to go.  Perhaps this attitude emboldened me to profit by the last seconds
of our interview; and it certainly rendered her escape the more easy.

'O, you are too romantic!' she said, laughing; and with that my sun was
blown out, my enchantress had fled away, and I was again left alone in
the twilight with the lady hens.

CHAPTER IX--THREE IS COMPANY, AND FOUR NONE

The rest of the day I slept in the corner of the hen-house upon Flora's
shawl.  Nor did I awake until a light shone suddenly in my eyes, and
starting up with a gasp (for, indeed, at the moment I dreamed I was still
swinging from the Castle battlements) I found Ronald bending over me with
a lantern.  It appeared it was past midnight, that I had slept about
sixteen hours, and that Flora had returned her poultry to the shed and I
had heard her not.  I could not but wonder if she had stooped to look at
me as I slept.  The puritan hens now slept irremediably; and being
cheered with the promise of supper I wished them an ironical good-night,
and was lighted across the garden and noiselessly admitted to a bedroom
on the ground floor of the cottage.  There I found soap, water,
razors--offered me diffidently by my beardless host--and an outfit of new
clothes.  To be shaved again without depending on the barber of the gaol
was a source of a delicious, if a childish joy.  My hair was sadly too
long, but I was none so unwise as to make an attempt on it myself.  And,
indeed, I thought it did not wholly misbecome me as it was, being by
nature curly.  The clothes were about as good as I expected.  The
waistcoat was of toilenet, a pretty piece, the trousers of fine
kerseymere, and the coat sat extraordinarily well.  Altogether, when I
beheld this changeling in the glass, I kissed my hand to him.

'My dear fellow,' said I, 'have you no scent?'

'Good God, no!' cried Ronald.  'What do you want with scent?'

'Capital thing on a campaign,' said I.  'But I can do without.'

I was now led, with the same precautions against noise, into the little
bow-windowed dining-room of the cottage.  The shutters were up, the lamp
guiltily turned low; the beautiful Flora greeted me in a whisper; and
when I was set down to table, the pair proceeded to help me with
precautions that might have seemed excessive in the Ear of Dionysius.

'She sleeps up there,' observed the boy, pointing to the ceiling; and the
knowledge that I was so imminently near to the resting-place of that gold
eyeglass touched even myself with some uneasiness.

Our excellent youth had imported from the city a meat pie, and I was glad
to find it flanked with a decanter of really admirable wine of Oporto.
While I ate, Ronald entertained me with the news of the city, which had
naturally rung all day with our escape: troops and mounted messengers had
followed each other forth at all hours and in all directions; but
according to the last intelligence no recapture had been made.  Opinion
in town was very favourable to us: our courage was applauded, and many
professed regret that our ultimate chance of escape should be so small.
The man who had fallen was one Sombref, a peasant; he was one who slept
in a different part of the Castle; and I was thus assured that the whole
of my former companions had attained their liberty, and Shed A was
untenanted.

From this we wandered insensibly into other topics.  It is impossible to
exaggerate the pleasure I took to be thus sitting at the same table with
Flora, in the clothes of a gentleman, at liberty and in the full
possession of my spirits and resources; of all of which I had need,
because it was necessary that I should support at the same time two
opposite characters, and at once play the cavalier and lively soldier for
the eyes of Ronald, and to the ears of Flora maintain the same profound
and sentimental note that I had already sounded.  Certainly there are
days when all goes well with a man; when his wit, his digestion, his
mistress are in a conspiracy to spoil him, and even the weather smiles
upon his wishes.  I will only say of myself upon that evening that I
surpassed my expectations, and was privileged to delight my hosts.
Little by little they forgot their terrors and I my caution; until at
last we were brought back to earth by a catastrophe that might very
easily have been foreseen, but was not the less astonishing to us when it
occurred.

I had filled all the glasses.  'I have a toast to propose,' I whispered,
'or rather three, but all so inextricably interwoven that they will not
bear dividing.  I wish first to drink to the health of a brave and
therefore a generous enemy.  He found me disarmed, a fugitive and
helpless.  Like the lion, he disdained so poor a triumph; and when he
might have vindicated an easy valour, he preferred to make a friend.  I
wish that we should next drink to a fairer and a more tender foe.  She
found me in prison; she cheered me with a priceless sympathy; what she
has done since, I know she has done in mercy, and I only pray--I dare
scarce hope--her mercy may prove to have been merciful.  And I wish to
conjoin with these, for the first, and perhaps the last time, the
health--and I fear I may already say the memory--of one who has fought,
not always without success, against the soldiers of your nation; but who
came here, vanquished already, only to be vanquished again by the loyal
hand of the one, by the unforgettable eyes of the other.'

It is to be feared I may have lent at times a certain resonancy to my
voice; it is to be feared that Ronald, who was none the better for his
own hospitality, may have set down his glass with something of a clang.
Whatever may have been the cause, at least, I had scarce finished my
compliment before we were aware of a thump upon the ceiling overhead.  It
was to be thought some very solid body had descended to the floor from
the level (possibly) of a bed.  I have never seen consternation painted
in more lively colours than on the faces of my hosts.  It was proposed to
smuggle me forth into the garden, or to conceal my form under a horsehair
sofa which stood against the wall.  For the first expedient, as was now
plain by the approaching footsteps, there was no longer time; from the
second I recoiled with indignation.

'My dear creatures,' said I, 'let us die, but do not let us be
ridiculous.'

The words were still upon my lips when the door opened and my friend of
the gold eyeglass appeared, a memorable figure, on the threshold.  In one
hand she bore a bedroom candlestick; in the other, with the steadiness of
a dragoon, a horse-pistol.  She was wound about in shawls which did not
wholly conceal the candid fabric of her nightdress, and surmounted by a
nightcap of portentous architecture.  Thus accoutred, she made her
entrance; laid down the candle and pistol, as no longer called for;
looked about the room with a silence more eloquent than oaths; and then,
in a thrilling voice--'To whom have I the pleasure?' she said, addressing
me with a ghost of a bow.

'Madam, I am charmed, I am sure,' said I.  'The story is a little long;
and our meeting, however welcome, was for the moment entirely unexpected
by myself.  I am sure--' but here I found I was quite sure of nothing,
and tried again.  'I have the honour,' I began, and found I had the
honour to be only exceedingly confused.  With that, I threw myself
outright upon her mercy.  'Madam, I must be more frank with you,' I
resumed.  'You have already proved your charity and compassion for the
French prisoners, I am one of these; and if my appearance be not too much
changed, you may even yet recognise in me that _Oddity_ who had the good
fortune more than once to make you smile.'

Still gazing upon me through her glass, she uttered an uncompromising
grunt; and then, turning to her niece--'Flora,' said she, 'how comes he
here?'

The culprits poured out for a while an antiphony of explanations, which
died out at last in a miserable silence.

'I think at least you might have told your aunt,' she snorted.

'Madam,' I interposed, 'they were about to do so.  It is my fault if it
be not done already.  But I made it my prayer that your slumbers might be
respected, and this necessary formula of my presentation should be
delayed until to-morrow in the morning.'

The old lady regarded me with undissembled incredulity, to which I was
able to find no better repartee than a profound and I trust graceful
reverence.

'French prisoners are very well in their place,' she said, 'but I cannot
see that their place is in my private dining-room.'

'Madam,' said I, 'I hope it may be said without offence, but (except the
Castle of Edinburgh) I cannot think upon the spot from which I would so
readily be absent.'

At this, to my relief, I thought I could perceive a vestige of a smile to
steal upon that iron countenance and to be bitten immediately in.

'And if it is a fair question, what do they call ye?' she asked.

'At your service, the Vicomte Anne de St.-Yves,' said I.

'Mosha the Viscount,' said she, 'I am afraid you do us plain people a
great deal too much honour.'

'My dear lady,' said I, 'let us be serious for a moment.  What was I to
do?  Where was I to go?  And how can you be angry with these benevolent
children who took pity on one so unfortunate as myself?  Your humble
servant is no such terrific adventurer that you should come out against
him with horse-pistol and'--smiling--'bedroom candlesticks.  It is but a
young gentleman in extreme distress, hunted upon every side, and asking
no more than to escape from his pursuers.  I know your character, I read
it in your face'--the heart trembled in my body as I said these daring
words.  'There are unhappy English prisoners in France at this day,
perhaps at this hour.  Perhaps at this hour they kneel as I do; they take
the hand of her who might conceal and assist them; they press it to their
lips as I do--'

'Here, here!' cried the old lady, breaking from my solicitations.
'Behave yourself before folk!  Saw ever anyone the match of that?  And on
earth, my dears, what are we to do with him?'

'Pack him off, my dear lady,' said I: 'pack off the impudent fellow
double-quick!  And if it may be, and if your good heart allows it, help
him a little on the way he has to go.'

'What's this pie?' she cried stridently.  'Where is this pie from,
Flora?'

No answer was vouchsafed by my unfortunate and (I may say) extinct
accomplices.

'Is that my port?' she pursued.  'Hough!  Will somebody give me a glass
of my port wine?'

I made haste to serve her.

She looked at me over the rim with an extraordinary expression.  'I hope
ye liked it?' said she.

'It is even a magnificent wine,' said I.

'Aweel, it was my father laid it down,' said she.  'There were few knew
more about port wine than my father, God rest him!'  She settled herself
in a chair with an alarming air of resolution.  'And so there is some
particular direction that you wish to go in?' said she.

'O,' said I, following her example, 'I am by no means such a vagrant as
you suppose.  I have good friends, if I could get to them, for which all
I want is to be once clear of Scotland; and I have money for the road.'
And I produced my bundle.

'English bank-notes?' she said.  'That's not very handy for Scotland.
It's been some fool of an Englishman that's given you these, I'm
thinking.  How much is it?'

'I declare to heaven I never thought to count!' I exclaimed.  'But that
is soon remedied.'

And I counted out ten notes of ten pound each, all in the name of Abraham
Newlands, and five bills of country bankers for as many guineas.

'One hundred and twenty six pound five,' cried the old lady.  'And you
carry such a sum about you, and have not so much as counted it!  If you
are not a thief, you must allow you are very thief-like.'

'And yet, madam, the money is legitimately mine,' said I.

She took one of the bills and held it up.  'Is there any probability,
now, that this could be traced?' she asked.

'None, I should suppose; and if it were, it would be no matter,' said I.
'With your usual penetration, you guessed right.  An Englishman brought
it me.  It reached me, through the hands of his English solicitor, from
my great-uncle, the Comte de Keroual de Saint-Yves, I believe the richest
_emigre_ in London.'

'I can do no more than take your word for it,' said she.

'And I trust, madam, not less,' said I.

'Well,' said she, 'at this rate the matter may be feasible.  I will cash
one of these five-guinea bills, less the exchange, and give you silver
and Scots notes to bear you as far as the border.  Beyond that, Mosha the
Viscount, you will have to depend upon yourself.'

I could not but express a civil hesitation as to whether the amount would
suffice, in my case, for so long a journey.

'Ay,' said she, 'but you havenae heard me out.  For if you are not too
fine a gentleman to travel with a pair of drovers, I believe I have found
the very thing, and the Lord forgive me for a treasonable old wife!
There are a couple stopping up by with the shepherd-man at the farm;
to-morrow they will take the road for England, probably by skriegh of
day--and in my opinion you had best be travelling with the stots,' said
she.

'For Heaven's sake do not suppose me to be so effeminate a character!' I
cried.  'An old soldier of Napoleon is certainly beyond suspicion.  But,
dear lady, to what end? and how is the society of these excellent
gentlemen supposed to help me?'

'My dear sir,' said she, 'you do not at all understand your own
predicament, and must just leave your matters in the hands of those who
do.  I dare say you have never even heard tell of the drove-roads or the
drovers; and I am certainly not going to sit up all night to explain it
to you.  Suffice it, that it is me who is arranging this affair--the more
shame to me!--and that is the way ye have to go.  Ronald,' she continued,
'away up-by to the shepherds; rowst them out of their beds, and make it
perfectly distinct that Sim is not to leave till he has seen me.'

Ronald was nothing loath to escape from his aunt's neighbourhood, and
left the room and the cottage with a silent expedition that was more like
flight than mere obedience.  Meanwhile the old lady turned to her niece.

'And I would like to know what we are to do with him the night!' she
cried.

'Ronald and I meant to put him in the hen-house,' said the encrimsoned
Flora.

'And I can tell you he is to go to no such a place,' replied the aunt.
'Hen-house, indeed!  If a guest he is to be, he shall sleep in no mortal
hen-house.  Your room is the most fit, I think, if he will consent to
occupy it on so great a suddenty.  And as for you, Flora, you shall sleep
with me.'

I could not help admiring the prudence and tact of this old dowager, and
of course it was not for me to make objections.  Ere I well knew how, I
was alone with a flat candlestick, which is not the most sympathetic of
companions, and stood studying the snuff in a frame of mind between
triumph and chagrin.  All had gone well with my flight: the masterful
lady who had arrogated to herself the arrangement of the details gave me
every confidence; and I saw myself already arriving at my uncle's door.
But, alas! it was another story with my love affair.  I had seen and
spoken with her alone; I had ventured boldly; I had been not ill
received; I had seen her change colour, had enjoyed the undissembled
kindness of her eyes; and now, in a moment, down comes upon the scene
that apocalyptic figure with the nightcap and the horse-pistol, and with
the very wind of her coming behold me separated from my love!  Gratitude
and admiration contended in my breast with the extreme of natural
rancour.  My appearance in her house at past midnight had an air (I could
not disguise it from myself) that was insolent and underhand, and could
not but minister to the worst suspicions.  And the old lady had taken it
well.  Her generosity was no more to be called in question than her
courage, and I was afraid that her intelligence would be found to match.
Certainly, Miss Flora had to support some shrewd looks, and certainly she
had been troubled.  I could see but the one way before me: to profit by
an excellent bed, to try to sleep soon, to be stirring early, and to hope
for some renewed occasion in the morning.  To have said so much and yet
to say no more, to go out into the world upon so half-hearted a parting,
was more than I could accept.

It is my belief that the benevolent fiend sat up all night to baulk me.
She was at my bedside with a candle long ere day, roused me, laid out for
me a damnable misfit of clothes, and bade me pack my own (which were
wholly unsuited to the journey) in a bundle.  Sore grudging, I arrayed
myself in a suit of some country fabric, as delicate as sackcloth and
about as becoming as a shroud; and, on coming forth, found the dragon had
prepared for me a hearty breakfast.  She took the head of the table,
poured out the tea, and entertained me as I ate with a great deal of good
sense and a conspicuous lack of charm.  How often did I not regret the
change!--how often compare her, and condemn her in the comparison, with
her charming niece!  But if my entertainer was not beautiful, she had
certainly been busy in my interest.  Already she was in communication
with my destined fellow-travellers; and the device on which she had
struck appeared entirely suitable.  I was a young Englishman who had
outrun the constable; warrants were out against me in Scotland, and it
had become needful I should pass the border without loss of time, and
privately.

'I have given a very good account of you,' said she, 'which I hope you
may justify.  I told them there was nothing against you beyond the fact
that you were put to the haw (if that is the right word) for debt.'

'I pray God you have the expression incorrectly, ma'am,' said I.  'I do
not give myself out for a person easily alarmed; but you must admit there
is something barbarous and mediaeval in the sound well qualified to
startle a poor foreigner.'

'It is the name of a process in Scots Law, and need alarm no honest man,'
said she.  'But you are a very idle-minded young gentleman; you must
still have your joke, I see: I only hope you will have no cause to regret
it.'

'I pray you not to suppose, because I speak lightly, that I do not feel
deeply,' said I.  'Your kindness has quite conquered me; I lay myself at
your disposition, I beg you to believe, with real tenderness; I pray you
to consider me from henceforth as the most devoted of your friends.'

'Well, well,' she said, 'here comes your devoted friend the drover.  I'm
thinking he will be eager for the road; and I will not be easy myself
till I see you well off the premises, and the dishes washed, before my
servant-woman wakes.  Praise God, we have gotten one that is a treasure
at the sleeping!'

The morning was already beginning to be blue in the trees of the garden,
and to put to shame the candle by which I had breakfasted.  The lady rose
from table, and I had no choice but to follow her example.  All the time
I was beating my brains for any means by which I should be able to get a
word apart with Flora, or find the time to write her a billet.  The
windows had been open while I breakfasted, I suppose to ventilate the
room from any traces of my passage there; and, Master Ronald appearing on
the front lawn, my ogre leaned forth to address him.

'Ronald,' she said, 'wasn't that Sim that went by the wall?'

I snatched my advantage.  Right at her back there was pen, ink, and paper
laid out.  I wrote: 'I love you'; and before I had time to write more, or
so much as to blot what I had written, I was again under the guns of the
gold eyeglasses.

'It's time,' she began; and then, as she observed my occupation, 'Umph!'
she broke off.  'Ye have something to write?' she demanded.

'Some notes, madam,' said I, bowing with alacrity.

'Notes,' she said; 'or a note?'

'There is doubtless some _finesse_ of the English language that I do not
comprehend,' said I.

'I'll contrive, however, to make my meaning very plain to ye, Mosha le
Viscount,' she continued.  'I suppose you desire to be considered a
gentleman?'

'Can you doubt it, madam?' said I.

'I doubt very much, at least, whether you go to the right way about it,'
she said.  'You have come here to me, I cannot very well say how; I think
you will admit you owe me some thanks, if it was only for the breakfast I
made ye.  But what are you to me?  A waif young man, not so far to seek
for looks and manners, with some English notes in your pocket and a price
upon your head.  I am a lady; I have been your hostess, with however
little will; and I desire that this random acquaintance of yours with my
family will cease and determine.'

I believe I must have coloured.  'Madam,' said I, 'the notes are of no
importance; and your least pleasure ought certainly to be my law.  You
have felt, and you have been pleased to express, a doubt of me.  I tear
them up.'  Which you may be sure I did thoroughly.

'There's a good lad!' said the dragon, and immediately led the way to the
front lawn.

The brother and sister were both waiting us here, and, as well as I could
make out in the imperfect light, bore every appearance of having passed
through a rather cruel experience.  Ronald seemed ashamed to so much as
catch my eye in the presence of his aunt, and was the picture of
embarrassment.  As for Flora, she had scarce the time to cast me one look
before the dragon took her by the arm, and began to march across the
garden in the extreme first glimmer of the dawn without exchanging
speech.  Ronald and I followed in equal silence.

There was a door in that same high wall on the top of which I had sat
perched no longer gone than yesterday morning.  This the old lady set
open with a key; and on the other side we were aware of a rough-looking,
thick-set man, leaning with his arms (through which was passed a
formidable staff) on a dry-stone dyke.  Him the old lady immediately
addressed.

'Sim,' said she, 'this is the young gentleman.'

Sim replied with an inarticulate grumble of sound, and a movement of one
arm and his head, which did duty for a salutation.

'Now, Mr. St. Ives,' said the old lady, 'it's high time for you to be
taking the road.  But first of all let me give the change of your
five-guinea bill.  Here are four pounds of it in British Linen notes, and
the balance in small silver, less sixpence.  Some charge a shilling, I
believe, but I have given you the benefit of the doubt.  See and guide it
with all the sense that you possess.'

'And here, Mr. St. Ives,' said Flora, speaking for the first time, 'is a
plaid which you will find quite necessary on so rough a journey.  I hope
you will take it from the hands of a Scotch friend,' she added, and her
voice trembled.

'Genuine holly: I cut it myself,' said Ronald, and gave me as good a
cudgel as a man could wish for in a row.

The formality of these gifts, and the waiting figure of the driver, told
me loudly that I must be gone.  I dropped on one knee and bade farewell
to the aunt, kissing her hand.  I did the like--but with how different a
passion!--to her niece; as for the boy, I took him to my arms and
embraced him with a cordiality that seemed to strike him speechless.
'Farewell!' and 'Farewell!' I said.  'I shall never forget my friends.
Keep me sometimes in memory.  Farewell!' With that I turned my back and
began to walk away; and had scarce done so, when I heard the door in the
high wall close behind me.  Of course this was the aunt's doing; and of
course, if I know anything of human character, she would not let me go
without some tart expressions.  I declare, even if I had heard them, I
should not have minded in the least, for I was quite persuaded that,
whatever admirers I might be leaving behind me in Swanston Cottage, the
aunt was not the least sincere.

CHAPTER X--THE DROVERS

It took me a little effort to come abreast of my new companion; for
though he walked with an ugly roll and no great appearance of speed, he
could cover the around at a good rate when he wanted to.  Each looked at
the other: I with natural curiosity, he with a great appearance of
distaste.  I have heard since that his heart was entirely set against me;
he had seen me kneel to the ladies, and diagnosed me for a 'gesterin'
eediot.'

'So, ye're for England, are ye?' said he.

I told him yes.

'Weel, there's waur places, I believe,' was his reply; and he relapsed
into a silence which was not broken during a quarter of an hour of steady
walking.

This interval brought us to the foot of a bare green valley, which wound
upwards and backwards among the hills.  A little stream came down the
midst and made a succession of clear pools; near by the lowest of which I
was aware of a drove of shaggy cattle, and a man who seemed the very
counterpart of Mr. Sim making a breakfast upon bread and cheese.  This
second drover (whose name proved to be Candlish) rose on our approach.

'Here's a mannie that's to gang through with us,' said Sim.  'It was the
auld wife, Gilchrist, wanted it.'

'Aweel, aweel,' said the other; and presently, remembering his manners,
and looking on me with a solemn grin, 'A fine day!' says he.

I agreed with him, and asked him how he did.

'Brawly,' was the reply; and without further civilities, the pair
proceeded to get the cattle under way.  This, as well as almost all the
herding, was the work of a pair of comely and intelligent dogs, directed
by Sim or Candlish in little more than monosyllables.  Presently we were
ascending the side of the mountain by a rude green track, whose presence
I had not hitherto observed.  A continual sound of munching and the
crying of a great quantity of moor birds accompanied our progress, which
the deliberate pace and perennial appetite of the cattle rendered
wearisomely slow.  In the midst my two conductors marched in a contented
silence that I could not but admire.  The more I looked at them, the more
I was impressed by their absurd resemblance to each other.  They were
dressed in the same coarse homespun, carried similar sticks, were equally
begrimed about the nose with snuff, and each wound in an identical plaid
of what is called the shepherd's tartan.  In a back view they might be
described as indistinguishable; and even from the front they were much
alike.  An incredible coincidence of humours augmented the impression.
Thrice and four times I attempted to pave the way for some exchange of
thought, sentiment, or--at the least of it--human words.  An _Ay_ or an
_Nhm_ was the sole return, and the topic died on the hill-side without
echo.  I can never deny that I was chagrined; and when, after a little
more walking, Sim turned towards me and offered me a ram's horn of snuff,
with the question 'Do ye use it?' I answered, with some animation,
'Faith, sir, I would use pepper to introduce a little cordiality.'  But
even this sally failed to reach, or at least failed to soften, my
companions.

At this rate we came to the summit of a ridge, and saw the track descend
in front of us abruptly into a desert vale, about a league in length, and
closed at the farther end by no less barren hilltops.  Upon this point of
vantage Sim came to a halt, took off his hat, and mopped his brow.

'Weel,' he said, 'here we're at the top o' Howden.'

'The top o' Howden, sure eneuch,' said Candlish.

'Mr. St. Ivey, are ye dry?' said the first.

'Now, really,' said I, 'is not this Satan reproving sin?'

'What ails ye, man?' said he.  'I'm offerin' ye a dram.'

'Oh, if it be anything to drink,' said I, 'I am as dry as my neighbours.'

Whereupon Sim produced from the corner of his plaid a black bottle, and
we all drank and pledged each other.  I found these gentlemen followed
upon such occasions an invariable etiquette, which you may be certain I
made haste to imitate.  Each wiped his mouth with the back of his left
hand, held up the bottle in his right, remarked with emphasis, 'Here's to
ye!' and swallowed as much of the spirit as his fancy prompted.  This
little ceremony, which was the nearest thing to manners I could perceive
in either of my companions, was repeated at becoming intervals, generally
after an ascent.  Occasionally we shared a mouthful of ewe-milk cheese
and an inglorious form of bread, which I understood (but am far from
engaging my honour on the point) to be called 'shearer's bannock.'  And
that may be said to have concluded our whole active intercourse for the
first day.

I had the more occasion to remark the extraordinarily desolate nature of
that country, through which the drove road continued, hour after hour and
even day after day, to wind.  A continual succession of insignificant
shaggy hills, divided by the course of ten thousand brooks, through which
we had to wade, or by the side of which we encamped at night; infinite
perspectives of heather, infinite quantities of moorfowl; here and there,
by a stream side, small and pretty clumps of willows or the silver birch;
here and there, the ruins of ancient and inconsiderable fortresses--made
the unchanging characters of the scene.  Occasionally, but only in the
distance, we could perceive the smoke of a small town or of an isolated
farmhouse or cottage on the moors; more often, a flock of sheep and its
attendant shepherd, or a rude field of agriculture perhaps not yet
harvested.  With these alleviations, we might almost be said to pass
through an unbroken desert--sure, one of the most impoverished in Europe;
and when I recalled to mind that we were yet but a few leagues from the
chief city (where the law courts sat every day with a press of business,
soldiers garrisoned the castle, and men of admitted parts were carrying
on the practice of letters and the investigations of science), it gave me
a singular view of that poor, barren, and yet illustrious country through
which I travelled.  Still more, perhaps, did it commend the wisdom of
Miss Gilchrist in sending me with these uncouth companions and by this
unfrequented path.

My itinerary is by no means clear to me; the names and distances I never
clearly knew, and have now wholly forgotten; and this is the more to be
regretted as there is no doubt that, in the course of those days, I must
have passed and camped among sites which have been rendered illustrious
by the pen of Walter Scott.  Nay, more, I am of opinion that I was still
more favoured by fortune, and have actually met and spoken with that
inimitable author.  Our encounter was of a tall, stoutish, elderly
gentleman, a little grizzled, and of a rugged but cheerful and engaging
countenance.  He sat on a hill pony, wrapped in a plaid over his green
coat, and was accompanied by a horse-woman, his daughter, a young lady of
the most charming appearance.  They overtook us on a stretch of heath,
reined up as they came alongside, and accompanied us for perhaps a
quarter of an hour before they galloped off again across the hillsides to
our left.  Great was my amazement to find the unconquerable Mr. Sim thaw
immediately on the accost of this strange gentleman, who hailed him with
a ready familiarity, proceeded at once to discuss with him the trade of
droving and the prices of cattle, and did not disdain to take a pinch
from the inevitable ram's horn.  Presently I was aware that the
stranger's eye was directed on myself; and there ensued a conversation,
some of which I could not help overhearing at the time, and the rest have
pieced together more or less plausibly from the report of Sim.

'Surely that must be an _amateur drover_ ye have gotten there?' the
gentleman seems to have asked.

Sim replied, I was a young gentleman that had a reason of his own to
travel privately.

'Well, well, ye must tell me nothing of that.  I am in the law, you know,
and _tace_ is the Latin for a candle,' answered the gentleman.  'But I
hope it's nothing bad.'

Sim told him it was no more than debt.

'Oh, Lord, if that be all!' cried the gentleman; and turning to myself,
'Well, sir,' he added, 'I understand you are taking a tramp through our
forest here for the pleasure of the thing?'

'Why, yes, sir,' said I; 'and I must say I am very well entertained.'

'I envy you,' said he.  'I have jogged many miles of it myself when I was
younger.  My youth lies buried about here under every heather-bush, like
the soul of the licentiate Lucius.  But you should have a guide.  The
pleasure of this country is much in the legends, which grow as plentiful
as blackberries.'  And directing my attention to a little fragment of a
broken wall no greater than a tombstone, he told me for an example a
story of its earlier inhabitants.  Years after it chanced that I was one
day diverting myself with a Waverley Novel, when what should I come upon
but the identical narrative of my green-coated gentleman upon the moors!
In a moment the scene, the tones of his voice, his northern accent, and
the very aspect of the earth and sky and temperature of the weather,
flashed back into my mind with the reality of dreams.  The unknown in the
green-coat had been the Great Unknown!  I had met Scott; I had heard a
story from his lips; I should have been able to write, to claim
acquaintance, to tell him that his legend still tingled in my ears.  But
the discovery came too late, and the great man had already succumbed
under the load of his honours and misfortunes.

Presently, after giving us a cigar apiece, Scott bade us farewell and
disappeared with his daughter over the hills.  And when I applied to Sim
for information, his answer of 'The Shirra, man!  A'body kens the
Shirra!' told me, unfortunately, nothing.

A more considerable adventure falls to be related.  We were now near the
border.  We had travelled for long upon the track beaten and browsed by a
million herds, our predecessors, and had seen no vestige of that traffic
which had created it.  It was early in the morning when we at last
perceived, drawing near to the drove road, but still at a distance of
about half a league, a second caravan, similar to but larger than our
own.  The liveliest excitement was at once exhibited by both my comrades.
They climbed hillocks, they studied the approaching drove from under
their hand, they consulted each other with an appearance of alarm that
seemed to me extraordinary.  I had learned by this time that their
stand-off manners implied, at least, no active enmity; and I made bold to
ask them what was wrong.

'Bad yins,' was Sim's emphatic answer.

All day the dogs were kept unsparingly on the alert, and the drove pushed
forward at a very unusual and seemingly unwelcome speed.  All day Sim and
Candlish, with a more than ordinary expenditure both of snuff and of
words, continued to debate the position.  It seems that they had
recognised two of our neighbours on the road--one Faa, and another by the
name of Gillies.  Whether there was an old feud between them still
unsettled I could never learn; but Sim and Candlish were prepared for
every degree of fraud or violence at their hands.  Candlish repeatedly
congratulated himself on having left 'the watch at home with the
mistress'; and Sim perpetually brandished his cudgel, and cursed his
ill-fortune that it should be sprung.

'I willna care a damn to gie the daashed scoon'rel a fair clout wi' it,'
he said.  'The daashed thing micht come sindry in ma hand.'

'Well, gentlemen,' said I, 'suppose they do come on, I think we can give
a very good account of them.'  And I made my piece of holly, Ronald's
gift, the value of which I now appreciated, sing about my head.

'Ay, man?  Are ye stench?' inquired Sim, with a gleam of approval in his
wooden countenance.

The same evening, somewhat wearied with our day-long expedition, we
encamped on a little verdant mound, from the midst of which there welled
a spring of clear water scarce great enough to wash the hands in.  We had
made our meal and lain down, but were not yet asleep, when a growl from
one of the collies set us on the alert.  All three sat up, and on a
second impulse all lay down again, but now with our cudgels ready.  A man
must be an alien and an outlaw, an old soldier and a young man in the
bargain, to take adventure easily.  With no idea as to the rights of the
quarrel or the probable consequences of the encounter, I was as ready to
take part with my two drovers, as ever to fall in line on the morning of
a battle.  Presently there leaped three men out of the heather; we had
scarce time to get to our feet before we were assailed; and in a moment
each one of us was engaged with an adversary whom the deepening twilight
scarce permitted him to see.  How the battle sped in other quarters I am
in no position to describe.  The rogue that fell to my share was
exceedingly agile and expert with his weapon; had and held me at a
disadvantage from the first assault; forced me to give ground
continually, and at last, in mere self-defence, to let him have the
point.  It struck him in the throat, and he went down like a ninepin and
moved no more.

It seemed this was the signal for the engagement to be discontinued.  The
other combatants separated at once; our foes were suffered, without
molestation, to lift up and bear away their fallen comrade; so that I
perceived this sort of war to be not wholly without laws of chivalry, and
perhaps rather to partake of the character of a tournament than of a
battle _a outrance_.  There was no doubt, at least, that I was supposed
to have pushed the affair too seriously.  Our friends the enemy removed
their wounded companion with undisguised consternation; and they were no
sooner over the top of the brae, than Sim and Candlish roused up their
wearied drove and set forth on a night march.

'I'm thinking Faa's unco bad,' said the one.

'Ay,' said the other, 'he lookit dooms gash.'

'He did that,' said the first.

And their weary silence fell upon them again.

Presently Sim turned to me.  'Ye're unco ready with the stick,' said he.

'Too ready, I'm afraid,' said I.  'I am afraid Mr. Faa (if that be his
name) has got his gruel.'

'Weel, I wouldnae wonder,' replied Sim.

'And what is likely to happen?' I inquired.

'Aweel,' said Sim, snuffing profoundly, 'if I were to offer an opeenion,
it would not be conscientious.  For the plain fac' is, Mr. St. Ivy, that
I div not ken.  We have had crackit heids--and rowth of them--ere now;
and we have had a broken leg or maybe twa; and the like of that we drover
bodies make a kind of a practice like to keep among oursel's.  But a corp
we have none of us ever had to deal with, and I could set nae leemit to
what Gillies micht consider proper in the affair.  Forbye that, he would
be in raither a hobble himsel', if he was to gang hame wantin' Faa.  Folk
are awfu' throng with their questions, and parteecularly when they're no
wantit.'

'That's a fac',' said Candlish.

I considered this prospect ruefully; and then making the best of it,
'Upon all which accounts,' said I, 'the best will be to get across the
border and there separate.  If you are troubled, you can very truly put
the blame upon your late companion; and if I am pursued, I must just try
to keep out of the way.'

'Mr. St. Ivy,' said Sim, with something resembling enthusiasm, 'no' a
word mair!  I have met in wi' mony kinds o' gentry ere now; I hae seen o'
them that was the tae thing, and I hae seen o' them that was the tither;
but the wale of a gentleman like you I have no sae very frequently seen
the bate of.'

Our night march was accordingly pursued with unremitting diligence.  The
stars paled, the east whitened, and we were still, both dogs and men,
toiling after the wearied cattle.  Again and again Sim and Candlish
lamented the necessity: it was 'fair ruin on the bestial,' they declared;
but the thought of a judge and a scaffold hunted them ever forward.  I
myself was not so much to be pitied.  All that night, and during the
whole of the little that remained before us of our conjunct journey, I
enjoyed a new pleasure, the reward of my prowess, in the now loosened
tongue of Mr. Sim.  Candlish was still obdurately taciturn: it was the
man's nature; but Sim, having finally appraised and approved me,
displayed without reticence a rather garrulous habit of mind and a pretty
talent for narration.  The pair were old and close companions,
co-existing in these endless moors in a brotherhood of silence such as I
have heard attributed to the trappers of the west.  It seems absurd to
mention love in connection with so ugly and snuffy a couple; at least,
their trust was absolute; and they entertained a surprising admiration
for each other's qualities; Candlish exclaiming that Sim was 'grand
company!' and Sim frequently assuring me in an aside that for 'a rale,
auld, stench bitch, there was nae the bate of Candlish in braid
Scotland.'  The two dogs appeared to be entirely included in this family
compact, and I remarked that their exploits and traits of character were
constantly and minutely observed by the two masters.  Dog stories
particularly abounded with them; and not only the dogs of the present but
those of the past contributed their quota.  'But that was naething,' Sim
would begin: 'there was a herd in Manar, they ca'd him Tweedie--ye'll
mind Tweedie, Can'lish?'  'Fine, that!' said Candlish.  'Aweel, Tweedie
had a dog--'  The story I have forgotten; I dare say it was dull, and I
suspect it was not true; but indeed, my travels with the drove rendered
me indulgent, and perhaps even credulous, in the matter of dog stories.
Beautiful, indefatigable beings! as I saw them at the end of a long day's
journey frisking, barking, bounding, striking attitudes, slanting a bushy
tail, manifestly playing to the spectator's eye, manifestly rejoicing in
their grace and beauty--and turned to observe Sim and Candlish
unornamentally plodding in the rear with the plaids about their bowed
shoulders and the drop at their snuffy nose--I thought I would rather
claim kinship with the dogs than with the men!  My sympathy was
unreturned; in their eyes I was a creature light as air; and they would
scarce spare me the time for a perfunctory caress or perhaps a hasty lap
of the wet tongue, ere they were back again in sedulous attendance on
those dingy deities, their masters--and their masters, as like as not,
damning their stupidity.

Altogether the last hours of our tramp were infinitely the most agreeable
to me, and I believe to all of us; and by the time we came to separate,
there had grown up a certain familiarity and mutual esteem that made the
parting harder.  It took place about four of the afternoon on a bare
hillside from which I could see the ribbon of the great north road,
henceforth to be my conductor.  I asked what was to pay.

'Naething,' replied Sim.

'What in the name of folly is this?' I exclaimed.  'You have led me, you
have fed me, you have filled me full of whisky, and now you will take
nothing!'

'Ye see we indentit for that,' replied Sim.

 'Indented?' I repeated; 'what does the man mean?'

'Mr. St. Ivy,' said Sim, 'this is a maitter entirely between Candlish and
me and the auld wife, Gilchrist.  You had naething to say to it; weel, ye
can have naething to do with it, then.'

'My good man,' said I, 'I can allow myself to be placed in no such
ridiculous position.  Mrs. Gilchrist is nothing to me, and I refuse to be
her debtor.'

'I dinna exac'ly see what way ye're gaun to help it,' observed my drover.

'By paying you here and now,' said I.

'There's aye twa to a bargain, Mr. St. Ives,' said he.

'You mean that you will not take it?' said I.

'There or thereabout,' said he.  'Forbye, that it would set ye a heap
better to keep your siller for them you awe it to.  Ye're young, Mr. St.
Ivy, and thoughtless; but it's my belief that, wi' care and
circumspection, ye may yet do credit to yoursel'.  But just you bear this
in mind: that him that _awes_ siller should never _gie_ siller.'

Well, what was there to say?  I accepted his rebuke, and bidding the pair
farewell, set off alone upon my southward way.

'Mr. St. Ivy,' was the last word of Sim, 'I was never muckle ta'en up in
Englishry; but I think that I really ought to say that ye seem to me to
have the makings of quite a decent lad.'

CHAPTER XI--THE GREAT NORTH ROAD

It chanced that as I went down the hill these last words of my friend the
drover echoed not unfruitfully in my head.  I had never told these men
the least particulars as to my race or fortune, as it was a part, and the
best part, of their civility to ask no questions: yet they had dubbed me
without hesitation English.  Some strangeness in the accent they had
doubtless thus explained.  And it occurred to me, that if I could pass in
Scotland for an Englishman, I might be able to reverse the process and
pass in England for a Scot.  I thought, if I was pushed to it, I could
make a struggle to imitate the brogue; after my experience with Candlish
and Sim, I had a rich provision of outlandish words at my command; and I
felt I could tell the tale of Tweedie's dog so as to deceive a native.
At the same time, I was afraid my name of St. Ives was scarcely suitable;
till I remembered there was a town so called in the province of Cornwall,
thought I might yet be glad to claim it for my place of origin, and
decided for a Cornish family and a Scots education.  For a trade, as I
was equally ignorant of all, and as the most innocent might at any moment
be the means of my exposure, it was best to pretend to none.  And I
dubbed myself a young gentleman of a sufficient fortune and an idle,
curious habit of mind, rambling the country at my own charges, in quest
of health, information, and merry adventures.

At Newcastle, which was the first town I reached, I completed my
preparations for the part, before going to the inn, by the purchase of a
knapsack and a pair of leathern gaiters.  My plaid I continued to wear
from sentiment.  It was warm, useful to sleep in if I were again
benighted, and I had discovered it to be not unbecoming for a man of
gallant carriage.  Thus equipped, I supported my character of the
light-hearted pedestrian not amiss.  Surprise was indeed expressed that I
should have selected such a season of the year; but I pleaded some delays
of business, and smilingly claimed to be an eccentric.  The devil was in
it, I would say, if any season of the year was not good enough for me; I
was not made of sugar, I was no mollycoddle to be afraid of an ill-aired
bed or a sprinkle of snow; and I would knock upon the table with my fist
and call for t'other bottle, like the noisy and free-hearted young
gentleman I was.  It was my policy (if I may so express myself) to talk
much and say little.  At the inn tables, the country, the state of the
roads, the business interest of those who sat down with me, and the
course of public events, afforded me a considerable field in which I
might discourse at large and still communicate no information about
myself.  There was no one with less air of reticence; I plunged into my
company up to the neck; and I had a long cock-and-bull story of an aunt
of mine which must have convinced the most suspicious of my innocence.
'What!' they would have said, 'that young ass to be concealing anything!
Why, he has deafened me with an aunt of his until my head aches.  He only
wants you should give him a line, and he would tell you his whole descent
from Adam downward, and his whole private fortune to the last shilling.'
A responsible solid fellow was even so much moved by pity for my
inexperience as to give me a word or two of good advice: that I was but a
young man after all--I had at this time a deceptive air of youth that
made me easily pass for one-and-twenty, and was, in the circumstances,
worth a fortune--that the company at inns was very mingled, that I should
do well to be more careful, and the like; to all which I made answer that
I meant no harm myself and expected none from others, or the devil was in
it.  'You are one of those d---d prudent fellows that I could never abide
with,' said I.  'You are the kind of man that has a long head.  That's
all the world, my dear sir: the long-heads and the short-horns!  Now, I
am a short-horn.'  'I doubt,' says he, 'that you will not go very far
without getting sheared.'  I offered to bet with him on that, and he made
off, shaking his head.

But my particular delight was to enlarge on politics and the war.  None
damned the French like me; none was more bitter against the Americans.
And when the north-bound mail arrived, crowned with holly, and the
coachman and guard hoarse with shouting victory, I went even so far as to
entertain the company to a bowl of punch, which I compounded myself with
no illiberal hand, and doled out to such sentiments as the following:--

'Our glorious victory on the Nivelle'!  'Lord Wellington, God bless him!
and may victory ever attend upon his arms!' and, 'Soult, poor devil! and
may he catch it again to the same tune!'

Never was oratory more applauded to the echo--never any one was more of
the popular man than I.  I promise you, we made a night of it.  Some of
the company supported each other, with the assistance of boots, to their
respective bedchambers, while the rest slept on the field of glory where
we had left them; and at the breakfast table the next morning there was
an extraordinary assemblage of red eyes and shaking fists.  I observed
patriotism to burn much lower by daylight.  Let no one blame me for
insensibility to the reverses of France!  God knows how my heart raged.
How I longed to fall on that herd of swine and knock their heads together
in the moment of their revelry!  But you are to consider my own situation
and its necessities; also a certain lightheartedness, eminently Gallic,
which forms a leading trait in my character, and leads me to throw myself
into new circumstances with the spirit of a schoolboy.  It is possible
that I sometimes allowed this impish humour to carry me further than good
taste approves: and I was certainly punished for it once.

This was in the episcopal city of Durham.  We sat down, a considerable
company, to dinner, most of us fine old vatted English tories of that
class which is often so enthusiastic as to be inarticulate.  I took and
held the lead from the beginning; and, the talk having turned on the
French in the Peninsula, I gave them authentic details (on the authority
of a cousin of mine, an ensign) of certain cannibal orgies in Galicia, in
which no less a person than General Caffarelli had taken a part.  I
always disliked that commander, who once ordered me under arrest for
insubordination; and it is possible that a spice of vengeance added to
the rigour of my picture.  I have forgotten the details; no doubt they
were high-coloured.  No doubt I rejoiced to fool these jolter-heads; and
no doubt the sense of security that I drank from their dull, gasping
faces encouraged me to proceed extremely far.  And for my sins, there was
one silent little man at table who took my story at the true value.  It
was from no sense of humour, to which he was quite dead.  It was from no
particular intelligence, for he had not any.  The bond of sympathy, of
all things in the world, had rendered him clairvoyant.

Dinner was no sooner done than I strolled forth into the streets with
some design of viewing the cathedral; and the little man was silently at
my heels.  A few doors from the inn, in a dark place of the street, I was
aware of a touch on my arm, turned suddenly, and found him looking up at
me with eyes pathetically bright.

'I beg your pardon, sir; but that story of yours was particularly rich.
He--he!  Particularly racy,' said he.  'I tell you, sir, I took you
wholly!  I _smoked_ you!  I believe you and I, sir, if we had a chance to
talk, would find we had a good many opinions in common.  Here is the
"Blue Bell," a very comfortable place.  They draw good ale, sir.  Would
you be so condescending as to share a pot with me?'

There was something so ambiguous and secret in the little man's perpetual
signalling, that I confess my curiosity was much aroused.  Blaming
myself, even as I did so, for the indiscretion, I embraced his proposal,
and we were soon face to face over a tankard of mulled ale.  He lowered
his voice to the least attenuation of a whisper.

'Here, sir,' said he, 'is to the Great Man.  I think you take me?  No?'
He leaned forward till our noses touched.  'Here is to the Emperor!' said
he.

I was extremely embarrassed, and, in spite of the creature's innocent
appearance, more than half alarmed.  I thought him too ingenious, and,
indeed, too daring for a spy.  Yet if he were honest he must be a man of
extraordinary indiscretion, and therefore very unfit to be encouraged by
an escaped prisoner.  I took a half course, accordingly--accepted his
toast in silence, and drank it without enthusiasm.

He proceeded to abound in the praises of Napoleon, such as I had never
heard in France, or at least only on the lips of officials paid to offer
them.

'And this Caffarelli, now,' he pursued: 'he is a splendid fellow, too, is
he not?  I have not heard vastly much of him myself.  No details, sir--no
details!  We labour under huge difficulties here as to unbiassed
information.'

'I believe I have heard the same complaint in other countries,' I could
not help remarking.  'But as to Caffarelli, he is neither lame nor blind,
he has two legs and a nose in the middle of his face.  And I care as much
about him as you care for the dead body of Mr. Perceval!'

He studied me with glowing eyes.

'You cannot deceive me!' he cried.  'You have served under him.  You are
a Frenchman!  I hold by the hand, at last, one of that noble race, the
pioneers of the glorious principles of liberty and brotherhood.  Hush!
No, it is all right.  I thought there had been somebody at the door.  In
this wretched, enslaved country we dare not even call our souls our own.
The spy and the hangman, sir--the spy and the hangman!  And yet there is
a candle burning, too.  The good leaven is working, sir--working
underneath.  Even in this town there are a few brave spirits, who meet
every Wednesday.  You must stay over a day or so, and join us.  We do not
use this house.  Another, and a quieter.  They draw fine ale,
however--fair, mild ale.  You will find yourself among friends, among
brothers.  You will hear some very daring sentiments expressed!' he
cried, expanding his small chest.  'Monarchy, Christianity--all the
trappings of a bloated past--the Free Confraternity of Durham and
Tyneside deride.'

Here was a devil of a prospect for a gentleman whose whole design was to
avoid observation!  The Free Confraternity had no charms for me; daring
sentiments were no part of my baggage; and I tried, instead, a little
cold water.

'You seem to forget, sir, that my Emperor has re-established
Christianity,' I observed.

'Ah, sir, but that was policy!' he exclaimed.  'You do not understand
Napoleon.  I have followed his whole career.  I can explain his policy
from first to last.  Now for instance in the Peninsula, on which you were
so very amusing, if you will come to a friend's house who has a map of
Spain, I can make the whole course of the war quite clear to you, I
venture to say, in half an hour.'

This was intolerable.  Of the two extremes, I found I preferred the
British tory; and, making an appointment for the morrow, I pleaded sudden
headache, escaped to the inn, packed my knapsack, and fled, about nine at
night, from this accursed neighbourhood.  It was cold, starry, and clear,
and the road dry, with a touch of frost.  For all that, I had not the
smallest intention to make a long stage of it; and about ten o'clock,
spying on the right-hand side of the way the lighted windows of an
alehouse, I determined to bait there for the night.

It was against my principle, which was to frequent only the dearest inns;
and the misadventure that befell me was sufficient to make me more
particular in the future.  A large company was assembled in the parlour,
which was heavy with clouds of tobacco smoke, and brightly lighted up by
a roaring fire of coal.  Hard by the chimney stood a vacant chair in what
I thought an enviable situation, whether for warmth or the pleasure of
society; and I was about to take it, when the nearest of the company
stopped me with his hand.

'Beg thy pardon, sir,' said he; 'but that there chair belongs to a
British soldier.'

A chorus of voices enforced and explained.  It was one of Lord
Wellington's heroes.  He had been wounded under Rowland Hill.  He was
Colbourne's right-hand man.  In short, this favoured individual appeared
to have served with every separate corps, and under every individual
general in the Peninsula.  Of course I apologised.  I had not known.  The
devil was in it if a soldier had not a right to the best in England.  And
with that sentiment, which was loudly applauded, I found a corner of a
bench, and awaited, with some hopes of entertainment, the return of the
hero.  He proved, of course, to be a private soldier.  I say of course,
because no officer could possibly enjoy such heights of popularity.  He
had been wounded before San Sebastian, and still wore his arm in a sling.
What was a great deal worse for him, every member of the company had been
plying him with drink.  His honest yokel's countenance blazed as if with
fever, his eyes were glazed and looked the two ways, and his feet
stumbled as, amidst a murmur of applause, he returned to the midst of his
admirers.

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.

He had been timorous before; but at this, he seemed to lose the power of
speech a moment, and stared at me in a perfect enthusiasm of fear.

'Why not?' I continued.  'The idea is good.  I should be safe in there if
I were the monster Williams himself.  The great thing is to have me under
lock and key.  For it does lock; it is locked now,' said I, trying the
door.  '_A propos_, what have you for a cargo?  It must be precious.'

He found not a word to answer.

Rat-tat-tat, I went upon the door like a well-drilled footman.

'Any one at home?' I said, and stooped to listen.

There came out of the interior a stifled sneeze, the first of an
uncontrollable paroxysm; another followed immediately on the heels of it;
and then the driver turned with an oath, laid the lash upon the horses
with so much energy that they found their heels again, and the whole
equipage fled down the road at a gallop.

At the first sound of the sneeze, I had started back like a man shot.
The next moment, a great light broke on my mind, and I understood.  Here
was the secret of Fenn's trade: this was how he forwarded the escape of
prisoners, hawking them by night about the country in his covered cart.
There had been Frenchmen close to me; he who had just sneezed was my
countryman, my comrade, perhaps already my friend!  I took to my heels in
pursuit.  'Hold hard!' I shouted.  'Stop!  It's all right!  Stop!'  But
the driver only turned a white face on me for a moment, and redoubled his
efforts, bending forward, plying his whip and crying to his horses; these
lay themselves down to the gallop and beat the highway with flying hoofs;
and the cart bounded after them among the ruts and fled in a halo of rain
and spattering mud.  But a minute since, and it had been trundling along
like a lame cow; and now it was off as though drawn by Apollo's coursers.
There is no telling what a man can do, until you frighten him!

It was as much as I could do myself, though I ran valiantly, to maintain
my distance; and that (since I knew my countrymen so near) was become a
chief point with me.  A hundred yards farther on the cart whipped out of
the high-road into a lane embowered with leafless trees, and became lost
to view.  When I saw it next, the driver had increased his advantage
considerably, but all danger was at an end, and the horses had again
declined into a hobbling walk.  Persuaded that they could not escape me,
I took my time, and recovered my breath as I followed them.

Presently the lane twisted at right angles, and showed me a gate and the
beginning of a gravel sweep; and a little after, as I continued to
advance, a red brick house about seventy years old, in a fine style of
architecture, and presenting a front of many windows to a lawn and
garden.  Behind, I could see outhouses and the peaked roofs of stacks;
and I judged that a manor-house had in some way declined to be the
residence of a tenant-farmer, careless alike of appearances and
substantial comfort.  The marks of neglect were visible on every side, in
flower-bushes straggling beyond the borders, in the ill-kept turf, and in
the broken windows that were incongruously patched with paper or stuffed
with rags.  A thicket of trees, mostly evergreen, fenced the place round
and secluded it from the eyes of prying neighbours.  As I came in view of
it, on that melancholy winter's morning, in the deluge of the falling
rain, and with the wind that now rose in occasional gusts and hooted over
the old chimneys, the cart had already drawn up at the front-door steps,
and the driver was already in earnest discourse with Mr. Burchell Fenn.
He was standing with his hands behind his back--a man of a gross,
misbegotten face and body, dewlapped like a bull and red as a harvest
moon; and in his jockey cap, blue coat and top boots, he had much the air
of a good, solid tenant-farmer.

The pair continued to speak as I came up the approach, but received me at
last in a sort of goggling silence.  I had my hat in my hand.

'I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Burchell Fenn?' said I.

'The same, sir,' replied Mr. Fenn, taking off his jockey cap in answer to
my civility, but with the distant look and the tardy movements of one who
continues to think of something else.  'And who may you be?' he asked.

'I shall tell you afterwards,' said I.  'Suffice it, in the meantime,
that I come on business.'

He seemed to digest my answer laboriously, his mouth gaping, his little
eyes never straying from my face.

'Suffer me to point out to you, sir,' I resumed, 'that this is a devil of
a wet morning; and that the chimney corner, and possibly a glass of
something hot, are clearly indicated.'

Indeed, the rain was now grown to be a deluge; the gutters of the house
roared; the air was filled with the continuous, strident crash.  The
stolidity of his face, on which the rain streamed, was far from
reassuring me.  On the contrary, I was aware of a distinct qualm of
apprehension, which was not at all lessened by a view of the driver,
craning from his perch to observe us with the expression of a fascinated
bird.  So we stood silent, when the prisoner again began to sneeze from
the body of the cart; and at the sound, prompt as a transformation, the
driver had whipped up his horses and was shambling off round the corner
of the house, and Mr. Fenn, recovering his wits with a gulp, had turned
to the door behind him.

'Come in, come in, sir,' he said.  'I beg your pardon, sir; the lock goes
a trifle hard.'

Indeed, it took him a surprising time to open the door, which was not
only locked on the outside, but the lock seemed rebellious from disuse;
and when at last he stood back and motioned me to enter before him, I was
greeted on the threshold by that peculiar and convincing sound of the
rain echoing over empty chambers.  The entrance-hall, in which I now
found myself, was of a good size and good proportions; potted plants
occupied the corners; the paved floor was soiled with muddy footprints
and encumbered with straw; on a mahogany hall-table, which was the only
furniture, a candle had been stuck and suffered to burn down--plainly a
long while ago, for the gutterings were green with mould.  My mind, under
these new impressions, worked with unusual vivacity.  I was here shut off
with Fenn and his hireling in a deserted house, a neglected garden, and a
wood of evergreens: the most eligible theatre for a deed of darkness.
There came to me a vision of two flagstones raised in the hall-floor, and
the driver putting in the rainy afternoon over my grave, and the prospect
displeased me extremely.  I felt I had carried my pleasantry as far as
was safe; I must lose no time in declaring my true character, and I was
even choosing the words in which I was to begin, when the hall-door was
slammed-to behind me with a bang, and I turned, dropping my stick as I
did so, in time--and not any more than time--to save my life.

The surprise of the onslaught and the huge weight of my assailant gave
him the advantage.  He had a pistol in his right hand of a portentous
size, which it took me all my strength to keep deflected.  With his left
arm he strained me to his bosom, so that I thought I must be crushed or
stifled.  His mouth was open, his face crimson, and he panted aloud with
hard animal sounds.  The affair was as brief as it was hot and sudden.
The potations which had swelled and bloated his carcase had already
weakened the springs of energy.  One more huge effort, that came near to
overpower me, and in which the pistol happily exploded, and I felt his
grasp slacken and weakness come on his joints; his legs succumbed under
his weight, and he grovelled on his knees on the stone floor.  'Spare
me!' he gasped.

I had not only been abominably frightened; I was shocked besides: my
delicacy was in arms, like a lady to whom violence should have been
offered by a similar monster.  I plucked myself from his horrid contact,
I snatched the pistol--even discharged, it was a formidable weapon--and
menaced him with the butt.  'Spare you!' I cried, 'you beast!'

His voice died in his fat inwards, but his lips still vehemently framed
the same words of supplication.  My anger began to pass off, but not all
my repugnance; the picture he made revolted me, and I was impatient to be
spared the further view of it.

'Here,' said I, 'stop this performance: it sickens me.  I am not going to
kill you, do you hear?  I have need of you.'

A look of relief, that I could almost have called beautiful, dawned on
his countenance.  'Anything--anything you wish,' said he.

Anything is a big word, and his use of it brought me for a moment to a
stand.  'Why, what do you mean?' I asked.  'Do you mean that you will
blow the gaff on the whole business?'

He answered me Yes with eager asseverations.

'I know Monsieur de Saint-Yves is in it; it was through his papers we
traced you,' I said.  'Do you consent to make a clean breast of the
others?'

'I do--I will!' he cried.  'The 'ole crew of 'em; there's good names
among 'em.  I'll be king's evidence.'

'So that all shall hang except yourself?  You damned villain!' I broke
out.  'Understand at once that I am no spy or thief-taker.  I am a
kinsman of Monsieur de St. Yves--here in his interest.  Upon my word, you
have put your foot in it prettily, Mr. Burchell Fenn!  Come, stand up;
don't grovel there.  Stand up, you lump of iniquity!'

He scrambled to his feet.  He was utterly unmanned, or it might have gone
hard with me yet; and I considered him hesitating, as, indeed, there was
cause.  The man was a double-dyed traitor: he had tried to murder me, and
I had first baffled his endeavours and then exposed and insulted him.
Was it wise to place myself any longer at his mercy?  With his help I
should doubtless travel more quickly; doubtless also far less agreeably;
and there was everything to show that it would be at a greater risk.  In
short, I should have washed my hands of him on the spot, but for the
temptation of the French officers, whom I knew to be so near, and for
whose society I felt so great and natural an impatience.  If I was to see
anything of my countrymen, it was clear I had first of all to make my
peace with Mr. Fenn; and that was no easy matter.  To make friends with
any one implies concessions on both sides; and what could I concede?
What could I say of him, but that he had proved himself a villain and a
fool, and the worse man?

'Well,' said I, 'here has been rather a poor piece of business, which I
dare say you can have no pleasure in calling to mind; and, to say truth,
I would as readily forget it myself.  Suppose we try.  Take back your
pistol, which smells very ill; put it in your pocket or wherever you had
it concealed.  There!  Now let us meet for the first time.--Give you good
morning, Mr. Fenn!  I hope you do very well.  I come on the
recommendation of my kinsman, the Vicomte de St. Yves.'

'Do you mean it?' he cried.  'Do you mean you will pass over our little
scrimmage?'

'Why, certainly!' said I.  'It shows you are a bold fellow, who may be
trusted to forget the business when it comes to the point.  There is
nothing against you in the little scrimmage, unless that your courage is
greater than your strength.  You are not so young as you once were, that
is all.'

'And I beg of you, sir, don't betray me to the Vis-count,' he pleaded.
'I'll not deny but what my 'eart failed me a trifle; but it was only a
word, sir, what anybody might have said in the 'eat of the moment, and
over with it.'

'Certainly,' said I.  'That is quite my own opinion.'

'The way I came to be anxious about the Vis-count,' he continued, 'is
that I believe he might be induced to form an 'asty judgment.  And the
business, in a pecuniary point of view, is all that I could ask; only
trying, sir--very trying.  It's making an old man of me before my time.
You might have observed yourself, sir, that I 'aven't got the knees I
once 'ad.  The knees and the breathing, there's where it takes me.  But
I'm very sure, sir, I address a gentleman as would be the last to make
trouble between friends.'

'I am sure you do me no more than justice,' said I; 'and I shall think it
quite unnecessary to dwell on any of these passing circumstances in my
report to the Vicomte.'

'Which you do favour him (if you'll excuse me being so bold as to mention
it) exac'ly!' said he.  'I should have known you anywheres.  May I offer
you a pot of 'ome-brewed ale, sir?  By your leave!  This way, if you
please.  I am 'eartily grateful--'eartily pleased to be of any service to
a gentleman like you, sir, which is related to the Vis-count, and really
a fambly of which you might well be proud!  Take care of the step, sir.
You have good news of 'is 'ealth, I trust? as well as that of Monseer the
Count?'

God forgive me! the horrible fellow was still puffing and panting with
the fury of his assault, and already he had fallen into an obsequious,
wheedling familiarity like that of an old servant,--already he was
flattering me on my family connections!

I followed him through the house into the stable-yard, where I observed
the driver washing the cart in a shed.  He must have heard the explosion
of the pistol.  He could not choose but hear it: the thing was shaped
like a little blunderbuss, charged to the mouth, and made a report like a
piece of field artillery.  He had heard, he had paid no attention; and
now, as we came forth by the back-door, he raised for a moment a pale and
tell-tale face that was as direct as a confession.  The rascal had
expected to see Fenn come forth alone; he was waiting to be called on for
that part of sexton, which I had already allotted to him in fancy.

I need not detain the reader very long with any description of my visit
to the back-kitchen; of how we mulled our ale there, and mulled it very
well; nor of how we sat talking, Fenn like an old, faithful, affectionate
dependant, and I--well!  I myself fallen into a mere admiration of so
much impudence, that transcended words, and had very soon conquered
animosity.  I took a fancy to the man, he was so vast a humbug.  I began
to see a kind of beauty in him, his _aplomb_ was so majestic.  I never
knew a rogue to cut so fat; his villainy was ample, like his belly, and I
could scarce find it in my heart to hold him responsible for either.  He
was good enough to drop into the autobiographical; telling me how the
farm, in spite of the war and the high prices, had proved a
disappointment; how there was 'a sight of cold, wet land as you come
along the 'igh-road'; how the winds and rains and the seasons had been
misdirected, it seemed 'o' purpose'; how Mrs. Fenn had died--'I lost her
coming two year agone; a remarkable fine woman, my old girl, sir! if
you'll excuse me,' he added, with a burst of humility.  In short, he gave
me an opportunity of studying John Bull, as I may say, stuffed naked--his
greed, his usuriousness, his hypocrisy, his perfidy of the back-stairs,
all swelled to the superlative--such as was well worth the little
disarray and fluster of our passage in the hall.

CHAPTER XIII--I MEET TWO OF MY COUNTRYMEN

As soon as I judged it safe, and that was not before Burchell Fenn had
talked himself back into his breath and a complete good humour, I
proposed he should introduce me to the French officers, henceforth to
become my fellow-passengers.  There were two of them, it appeared, and my
heart beat as I approached the door.  The specimen of Perfidious Albion
whom I had just been studying gave me the stronger zest for my
fellow-countrymen.  I could have embraced them; I could have wept on
their necks.  And all the time I was going to a disappointment.

It was in a spacious and low room, with an outlook on the court, that I
found them bestowed.  In the good days of that house the apartment had
probably served as a library, for there were traces of shelves along the
wainscot.  Four or five mattresses lay on the floor in a corner, with a
frowsy heap of bedding; near by was a basin and a cube of soap; a rude
kitchen-table and some deal chairs stood together at the far end; and the
room was illuminated by no less than four windows, and warmed by a
little, crazy, sidelong grate, propped up with bricks in the vent of a
hospitable chimney, in which a pile of coals smoked prodigiously and gave
out a few starveling flames.  An old, frail, white-haired officer sat in
one of the chairs, which he had drawn close to this apology for a fire.
He was wrapped in a camlet cloak, of which the collar was turned up, his
knees touched the bars, his hands were spread in the very smoke, and yet
he shivered for cold.  The second--a big, florid, fine animal of a man,
whose every gesture labelled him the cock of the walk and the admiration
of the ladies--had apparently despaired of the fire, and now strode up
and down, sneezing hard, bitterly blowing his nose, and proffering a
continual stream of bluster, complaint, and barrack-room oaths.

Fenn showed me in with the brief form of introduction: 'Gentlemen all,
this here's another fare!' and was gone again at once.  The old man gave
me but the one glance out of lack-lustre eyes; and even as he looked a
shiver took him as sharp as a hiccough.  But the other, who represented
to admiration the picture of a Beau in a Catarrh, stared at me
arrogantly.

'And who are you, sir?' he asked.

I made the military salute to my superiors.

'Champdivers, private, Eighth of the Line,' said I.

'Pretty business!' said he.  'And you are going on with us?  Three in a
cart, and a great trolloping private at that!  And who is to pay for you,
my fine fellow?' he inquired.

'If monsieur comes to that,' I answered civilly, 'who paid for him?'

'Oh, if you choose to play the wit!' said he,--and began to rail at large
upon his destiny, the weather, the cold, the danger and the expense of
the escape, and, above all, the cooking of the accursed English.  It
seemed to annoy him particularly that I should have joined their party.
'If you knew what you were doing, thirty thousand millions of pigs! you
would keep yourself to yourself!  The horses can't drag the cart; the
roads are all ruts and swamps.  No longer ago than last night the Colonel
and I had to march half the way--thunder of God!--half the way to the
knees in mud--and I with this infernal cold--and the danger of detection!
Happily we met no one: a desert--a real desert--like the whole abominable
country!  Nothing to eat--no, sir, there is nothing to eat but raw cow
and greens boiled in water--nor to drink but Worcestershire sauce!  Now
I, with my catarrh, I have no appetite; is it not so?  Well, if I were in
France, I should have a good soup with a crust in it, an omelette, a fowl
in rice, a partridge in cabbages--things to tempt me, thunder of God!
But here--day of God!--what a country!  And cold, too!  They talk about
Russia--this is all the cold I want!  And the people--look at them!  What
a race!  Never any handsome men; never any fine officers!'--and he looked
down complacently for a moment at his waist--'And the women--what
faggots!  No, that is one point clear, I cannot stomach the English!'

There was something in this man so antipathetic to me, as sent the
mustard into my nose.  I can never bear your bucks and dandies, even when
they are decent-looking and well dressed; and the Major--for that was his
rank--was the image of a flunkey in good luck.  Even to be in agreement
with him, or to seem to be so, was more than I could make out to endure.

'You could scarce be expected to stomach them,' said I civilly, 'after
having just digested your parole.'

He whipped round on his heel and turned on me a countenance which I dare
say he imagined to be awful; but another fit of sneezing cut him off ere
he could come the length of speech.

'I have not tried the dish myself,' I took the opportunity to add.  'It
is said to be unpalatable.  Did monsieur find it so?'

With surprising vivacity the Colonel woke from his lethargy.  He was
between us ere another word could pass.

'Shame, gentlemen!' he said.  'Is this a time for Frenchmen and
fellow-soldiers to fall out?  We are in the midst of our enemies; a
quarrel, a loud word, may suffice to plunge us back into irretrievable
distress.  _Monsieur le Commandant_, you have been gravely offended.  I
make it my request, I make it my prayer--if need be, I give you my
orders--that the matter shall stand by until we come safe to France.
Then, if you please, I will serve you in any capacity.  And for you,
young man, you have shown all the cruelty and carelessness of youth.
This gentleman is your superior; he is no longer young'--at which word
you are to conceive the Major's face.  'It is admitted he has broken his
parole.  I know not his reason, and no more do you.  It might be
patriotism in this hour of our country's adversity, it might be humanity,
necessity; you know not what in the least, and you permit yourself to
reflect on his honour.  To break parole may be a subject for pity and not
derision.  I have broken mine--I, a colonel of the Empire.  And why?  I
have been years negotiating my exchange, and it cannot be managed; those
who have influence at the Ministry of War continually rush in before me,
and I have to wait, and my daughter at home is in a decline.  I am going
to see my daughter at last, and it is my only concern lest I should have
delayed too long.  She is ill, and very ill,--at death's door.  Nothing
is left me but my daughter, my Emperor, and my honour; and I give my
honour, blame me for it who dare!'

At this my heart smote me.

'For God's sake,' I cried, 'think no more of what I have said!  A parole?
what is a parole against life and death and love?  I ask your pardon;
this gentleman's also.  As long as I shall be with you, you shall not
have cause to complain of me again.  I pray God you will find your
daughter alive and restored.'

'That is past praying for,' said the Colonel; and immediately the brief
fire died out of him, and, returning to the hearth, he relapsed into his
former abstraction.

But I was not so easy to compose.  The knowledge of the poor gentleman's
trouble, and the sight of his face, had filled me with the bitterness of
remorse; and I insisted upon shaking hands with the Major (which he did
with a very ill grace), and abounded in palinodes and apologies.

'After all,' said I, 'who am I to talk?  I am in the luck to be a private
soldier; I have no parole to give or to keep; once I am over the rampart,
I am as free as air.  I beg you to believe that I regret from my soul the
use of these ungenerous expressions.  Allow me . . . Is there no way in
this damned house to attract attention?  Where is this fellow, Fenn?'

I ran to one of the windows and threw it open.  Fenn, who was at the
moment passing below in the court, cast up his arms like one in despair,
called to me to keep back, plunged into the house, and appeared next
moment in the doorway of the chamber.

'Oh, sir!' says he, 'keep away from those there windows.  A body might
see you from the back lane.'

'It is registered,' said I.  'Henceforward I will be a mouse for
precaution and a ghost for invisibility.  But in the meantime, for God's
sake, fetch us a bottle of brandy!  Your room is as damp as the bottom of
a well, and these gentlemen are perishing of cold.'

So soon as I had paid him (for everything, I found, must be paid in
advance), I turned my attention to the fire, and whether because I threw
greater energy into the business, or because the coals were now warmed
and the time ripe, I soon started a blaze that made the chimney roar
again.  The shine of it, in that dark, rainy day, seemed to reanimate the
Colonel like a blink of sun.  With the outburst of the flames, besides, a
draught was established, which immediately delivered us from the plague
of smoke; and by the time Fenn returned, carrying a bottle under his arm
and a single tumbler in his hand, there was already an air of gaiety in
the room that did the heart good.

I poured out some of the brandy.

'Colonel,' said I, 'I am a young man and a private soldier.  I have not
been long in this room, and already I have shown the petulance that
belongs to the one character and the ill manners that you may look for in
the other.  Have the humanity to pass these slips over, and honour me so
far as to accept this glass.'

'My lad,' says he, waking up and blinking at me with an air of suspicion,
'are you sure you can afford it?'

I assured him I could.

'I thank you, then: I am very cold.'  He took the glass out, and a little
colour came in his face.  'I thank you again,' said he.  'It goes to the
heart.'

The Major, when I motioned him to help himself, did so with a good deal
of liberality; continued to do so for the rest of the morning, now with
some sort of apology, now with none at all; and the bottle began to look
foolish before dinner was served.  It was such a meal as he had himself
predicted: beef, greens, potatoes, mustard in a teacup, and beer in a
brown jug that was all over hounds, horses, and hunters, with a fox at
the fat end and a gigantic John Bull--for all the world like
Fenn--sitting in the midst in a bob-wig and smoking tobacco.  The beer
was a good brew, but not good enough for the Major; he laced it with
brandy--for his cold, he said; and in this curative design the remainder
of the bottle ebbed away.  He called my attention repeatedly to the
circumstance; helped me pointedly to the dregs, threw the bottle in the
air and played tricks with it; and at last, having exhausted his
ingenuity, and seeing me remain quite blind to every hint, he ordered and
paid for another himself.

As for the Colonel, he ate nothing, sat sunk in a muse, and only awoke
occasionally to a sense of where he was, and what he was supposed to be
doing.  On each of these occasions he showed a gratitude and kind
courtesy that endeared him to me beyond expression.  'Champdivers, my
lad, your health!' he would say.  'The Major and I had a very arduous
march last night, and I positively thought I should have eaten nothing,
but your fortunate idea of the brandy has made quite a new man of
me--quite a new man.'  And he would fall to with a great air of
heartiness, cut himself a mouthful, and, before he had swallowed it,
would have forgotten his dinner, his company, the place where he then
was, and the escape he was engaged on, and become absorbed in the vision
of a sick-room and a dying girl in France.  The pathos of this continual
preoccupation, in a man so old, sick, and over-weary, and whom I looked
upon as a mere bundle of dying bones and death-pains, put me wholly from
my victuals: it seemed there was an element of sin, a kind of rude
bravado of youth, in the mere relishing of food at the same table with
this tragic father; and though I was well enough used to the coarse,
plain diet of the English, I ate scarce more than himself.  Dinner was
hardly over before he succumbed to a lethargic sleep; lying on one of the
mattresses with his limbs relaxed, and his breath seemingly
suspended--the very image of dissolution.

This left the Major and myself alone at the table.  You must not suppose
our _tete-a-tete_ was long, but it was a lively period while it lasted.
He drank like a fish or an Englishman; shouted, beat the table, roared
out songs, quarrelled, made it up again, and at last tried to throw the
dinner-plates through the window, a feat of which he was at that time
quite incapable.  For a party of fugitives, condemned to the most
rigorous discretion, there was never seen so noisy a carnival; and
through it all the Colonel continued to sleep like a child.  Seeing the
Major so well advanced, and no retreat possible, I made a fair wind of a
foul one, keeping his glass full, pushing him with toasts; and sooner
than I could have dared to hope, he became drowsy and incoherent.  With
the wrong-headedness of all such sots, he would not be persuaded to lie
down upon one of the mattresses until I had stretched myself upon
another.  But the comedy was soon over; soon he slept the sleep of the
just, and snored like a military music; and I might get up again and face
(as best I could) the excessive tedium of the afternoon.

I had passed the night before in a good bed; I was denied the resource of
slumber; and there was nothing open for me but to pace the apartment,
maintain the fire, and brood on my position.  I compared yesterday and
to-day--the safety, comfort, jollity, open-air exercise and pleasant
roadside inns of the one, with the tedium, anxiety, and discomfort of the
other.  I remembered that I was in the hands of Fenn, who could not be
more false--though he might be more vindictive--than I fancied him.  I
looked forward to nights of pitching in the covered cart, and days of
monotony in I knew not what hiding-places; and my heart failed me, and I
was in two minds whether to slink off ere it was too late, and return to
my former solitary way of travel.  But the Colonel stood in the path.  I
had not seen much of him; but already I judged him a man of a childlike
nature--with that sort of innocence and courtesy that, I think, is only
to be found in old soldiers or old priests--and broken with years and
sorrow.  I could not turn my back on his distress; could not leave him
alone with the selfish trooper who snored on the next mattress.
'Champdivers, my lad, your health!' said a voice in my ear, and stopped
me--and there are few things I am more glad of in the retrospect than
that it did.

It must have been about four in the afternoon--at least the rain had
taken off, and the sun was setting with some wintry pomp--when the
current of my reflections was effectually changed by the arrival of two
visitors in a gig.  They were farmers of the neighbourhood, I
suppose--big, burly fellows in great-coats and top-boots, mightily
flushed with liquor when they arrived, and, before they left, inimitably
drunk.  They stayed long in the kitchen with Burchell, drinking,
shouting, singing, and keeping it up; and the sound of their merry
minstrelsy kept me a kind of company.  The night fell, and the shine of
the fire brightened and blinked on the panelled wall.  Our illuminated
windows must have been visible not only from the back lane of which Fenn
had spoken, but from the court where the farmers' gig awaited them.  In
the far end of the firelit room lay my companions, the one silent, the
other clamorously noisy, the images of death and drunkenness.  Little
wonder if I were tempted to join in the choruses below, and sometimes
could hardly refrain from laughter, and sometimes, I believe, from
tears--so unmitigated was the tedium, so cruel the suspense, of this
period.

At last, about six at night, I should fancy, the noisy minstrels appeared
in the court, headed by Fenn with a lantern, and knocking together as
they came.  The visitors clambered noisily into the gig, one of them
shook the reins, and they were snatched out of sight and hearing with a
suddenness that partook of the nature of prodigy.  I am well aware there
is a Providence for drunken men, that holds the reins for them and
presides over their troubles; doubtless he had his work cut out for him
with this particular gigful!  Fenn rescued his toes with an ejaculation
from under the departing wheels, and turned at once with uncertain steps
and devious lantern to the far end of the court.  There, through the open
doors of a coach-house, the shock-headed lad was already to be seen
drawing forth the covered cart.  If I wished any private talk with our
host, it must be now or never.

Accordingly I groped my way downstairs, and came to him as he looked on
at and lighted the harnessing of the horses.

'The hour approaches when we have to part,' said I; 'and I shall be
obliged if you will tell your servant to drop me at the nearest point for
Dunstable.  I am determined to go so far with our friends, Colonel X and
Major Y, but my business is peremptory, and it takes me to the
neighbourhood of Dunstable.'

Orders were given to my satisfaction, with an obsequiousness that seemed
only inflamed by his potations.

CHAPTER XIV--TRAVELS OF THE COVERED CART

My companions were aroused with difficulty: the Colonel, poor old
gentleman, to a sort of permanent dream, in which you could say of him
only that he was very deaf and anxiously polite; the Major still maudlin
drunk.  We had a dish of tea by the fireside, and then issued like
criminals into the scathing cold of the night.  For the weather had in
the meantime changed.  Upon the cessation of the rain, a strict frost had
succeeded.  The moon, being young, was already near the zenith when we
started, glittered everywhere on sheets of ice, and sparkled in ten
thousand icicles.  A more unpromising night for a journey it was hard to
conceive.  But in the course of the afternoon the horses had been well
roughed; and King (for such was the name of the shock-headed lad) was
very positive that he could drive us without misadventure.  He was as
good as his word; indeed, despite a gawky air, he was simply invaluable
in his present employment, showing marked sagacity in all that concerned
the care of horses, and guiding us by one short cut after another for
days, and without a fault.

The interior of that engine of torture, the covered cart, was fitted with
a bench, on which we took our places; the door was shut; in a moment, the
night closed upon us solid and stifling; and we felt that we were being
driven carefully out of the courtyard.  Careful was the word all night,
and it was an alleviation of our miseries that we did not often enjoy.
In general, as we were driven the better part of the night and day, often
at a pretty quick pace and always through a labyrinth of the most
infamous country lanes and by-roads, we were so bruised upon the bench,
so dashed against the top and sides of the cart, that we reached the end
of a stage in truly pitiable case, sometimes flung ourselves down without
the formality of eating, made but one sleep of it until the hour of
departure returned, and were only properly awakened by the first jolt of
the renewed journey.  There were interruptions, at times, that we hailed
as alleviations.  At times the cart was bogged, once it was upset, and we
must alight and lend the driver the assistance of our arms; at times, too
(as on the occasion when I had first encountered it), the horses gave
out, and we had to trail alongside in mud or frost until the first peep
of daylight, or the approach to a hamlet or a high road, bade us
disappear like ghosts into our prison.

The main roads of England are incomparable for excellence, of a beautiful
smoothness, very ingeniously laid down, and so well kept that in most
weathers you could take your dinner off any part of them without
distaste.  On them, to the note of the bugle, the mail did its sixty
miles a day; innumerable chaises whisked after the bobbing postboys; or
some young blood would flit by in a curricle and tandem, to the vast
delight and danger of the lieges.  On them, the slow-pacing waggons made
a music of bells, and all day long the travellers on horse-back and the
travellers on foot (like happy Mr. St. Ives so little a while before!)
kept coming and going, and baiting and gaping at each other, as though a
fair were due, and they were gathering to it from all England.  No,
nowhere in the world is travel so great a pleasure as in that country.
But unhappily our one need was to be secret; and all this rapid and
animated picture of the road swept quite apart from us, as we lumbered up
hill and down dale, under hedge and over stone, among circuitous byways.
Only twice did I receive, as it were, a whiff of the highway.  The first
reached my ears alone.  I might have been anywhere.  I only knew I was
walking in the dark night and among ruts, when I heard very far off, over
the silent country that surrounded us, the guard's horn wailing its
signal to the next post-house for a change of horses.  It was like the
voice of the day heard in darkness, a voice of the world heard in prison,
the note of a cock crowing in the mid-seas--in short, I cannot tell you
what it was like, you will have to fancy for yourself--but I could have
wept to hear it.  Once we were belated: the cattle could hardly crawl,
the day was at hand, it was a nipping, rigorous morning, King was lashing
his horses, I was giving an arm to the old Colonel, and the Major was
coughing in our rear.  I must suppose that King was a thought careless,
being nearly in desperation about his team, and, in spite of the cold
morning, breathing hot with his exertions.  We came, at last, a little
before sunrise to the summit of a hill, and saw the high-road passing at
right angles through an open country of meadows and hedgerow pollards;
and not only the York mail, speeding smoothly at the gallop of the four
horses, but a post-chaise besides, with the post-boy titupping briskly,
and the traveller himself putting his head out of the window, but whether
to breathe the dawn, or the better to observe the passage of the mail, I
do not know.  So that we enjoyed for an instant a picture of free life on
the road, in its most luxurious forms of despatch and comfort.  And
thereafter, with a poignant feeling of contrast in our hearts, we must
mount again into our wheeled dungeon.

We came to our stages at all sorts of odd hours, and they were in all
kinds of odd places.  I may say at once that my first experience was my
best.  Nowhere again were we so well entertained as at Burchell Fenn's.
And this, I suppose, was natural, and indeed inevitable, in so long and
secret a journey.  The first stop, we lay six hours in a barn standing by
itself in a poor, marshy orchard, and packed with hay; to make it more
attractive, we were told it had been the scene of an abominable murder,
and was now haunted.  But the day was beginning to break, and our fatigue
was too extreme for visionary terrors.  The second or third, we alighted
on a barren heath about midnight, built a fire to warm us under the
shelter of some thorns, supped like beggars on bread and a piece of cold
bacon, and slept like gipsies with our feet to the fire.  In the
meanwhile, King was gone with the cart, I know not where, to get a change
of horses, and it was late in the dark morning when he returned and we
were able to resume our journey.  In the middle of another night, we came
to a stop by an ancient, whitewashed cottage of two stories; a privet
hedge surrounded it; the frosty moon shone blankly on the upper windows;
but through those of the kitchen the firelight was seen glinting on the
roof and reflected from the dishes on the wall.  Here, after much
hammering on the door, King managed to arouse an old crone from the
chimney-corner chair, where she had been dozing in the watch; and we were
had in, and entertained with a dish of hot tea.  This old lady was an
aunt of Burchell Fenn's--and an unwilling partner in his dangerous trade.
Though the house stood solitary, and the hour was an unlikely one for any
passenger upon the road, King and she conversed in whispers only.  There
was something dismal, something of the sick-room, in this perpetual,
guarded sibilation.  The apprehensions of our hostess insensibly
communicated themselves to every one present.  We ate like mice in a
cat's ear; if one of us jingled a teaspoon, all would start; and when the
hour came to take the road again, we drew a long breath of relief, and
climbed to our places in the covered cart with a positive sense of
escape.  The most of our meals, however, were taken boldly at hedgerow
alehouses, usually at untimely hours of the day, when the clients were in
the field or the farmyard at labour.  I shall have to tell presently of
our last experience of the sort, and how unfortunately it miscarried; but
as that was the signal for my separation from my fellow-travellers, I
must first finish with them.

I had never any occasion to waver in my first judgment of the Colonel.
The old gentleman seemed to me, and still seems in the retrospect, the
salt of the earth.  I had occasion to see him in the extremes of
hardship, hunger and cold; he was dying, and he looked it; and yet I
cannot remember any hasty, harsh, or impatient word to have fallen from
his lips.  On the contrary, he ever showed himself careful to please; and
even if he rambled in his talk, rambled always gently--like a humane,
half-witted old hero, true to his colours to the last.  I would not dare
to say how often he awoke suddenly from a lethargy, and told us again, as
though we had never heard it, the story of how he had earned the cross,
how it had been given him by the hand of the Emperor, and of the
innocent--and, indeed, foolish--sayings of his daughter when he returned
with it on his bosom.  He had another anecdote which he was very apt to
give, by way of a rebuke, when the Major wearied us beyond endurance with
dispraises of the English.  This was an account of the _braves gens_ with
whom he had been boarding.  True enough, he was a man so simple and
grateful by nature, that the most common civilities were able to touch
him to the heart, and would remain written in his memory; but from a
thousand inconsiderable but conclusive indications, I gathered that this
family had really loved him, and loaded him with kindness.  They made a
fire in his bedroom, which the sons and daughters tended with their own
hands; letters from France were looked for with scarce more eagerness by
himself than by these alien sympathisers; when they came, he would read
them aloud in the parlour to the assembled family, translating as he
went.  The Colonel's English was elementary; his daughter not in the
least likely to be an amusing correspondent; and, as I conceived these
scenes in the parlour, I felt sure the interest centred in the Colonel
himself, and I thought I could feel in my own heart that mixture of the
ridiculous and the pathetic, the contest of tears and laughter, which
must have shaken the bosoms of the family.  Their kindness had continued
till the end.  It appears they were privy to his flight, the camlet cloak
had been lined expressly for him, and he was the bearer of a letter from
the daughter of the house to his own daughter in Paris.  The last
evening, when the time came to say good-night, it was tacitly known to
all that they were to look upon his face no more.  He rose, pleading
fatigue, and turned to the daughter, who had been his chief ally: 'You
will permit me, my dear--to an old and very unhappy soldier--and may God
bless you for your goodness!'  The girl threw her arms about his neck and
sobbed upon his bosom; the lady of the house burst into tears; '_et je
vous le jure_, _le pere se mouchait_!' quoth the Colonel, twisting his
moustaches with a cavalry air, and at the same time blinking the water
from his eyes at the mere recollection.

It was a good thought to me that he had found these friends in captivity;
that he had started on this fatal journey from so cordial a farewell.  He
had broken his parole for his daughter: that he should ever live to reach
her sick-bed, that he could continue to endure to an end the hardships,
the crushing fatigue, the savage cold, of our pilgrimage, I had early
ceased to hope.  I did for him what I was able,--nursed him, kept him
covered, watched over his slumbers, sometimes held him in my arms at the
rough places of the road.  'Champdivers,' he once said, 'you are like a
son to me--like a son.'  It is good to remember, though at the time it
put me on the rack.  All was to no purpose.  Fast as we were travelling
towards France, he was travelling faster still to another destination.
Daily he grew weaker and more indifferent.  An old rustic accent of Lower
Normandy reappeared in his speech, from which it had long been banished,
and grew stronger; old words of the _patois_, too: _Ouistreham_,
_matrasse_, and others, the sense of which we were sometimes unable to
guess.  On the very last day he began again his eternal story of the
cross and the Emperor.  The Major, who was particularly ill, or at least
particularly cross, uttered some angry words of protest.
'_Pardonnez-moi_, _monsieur le commandant_, _mais c'est pour monsieur_,'
said the Colonel: 'Monsieur has not yet heard the circumstance, and is
good enough to feel an interest.'  Presently after, however, he began to
lose the thread of his narrative; and at last: '_Que que j'ai_?  _Je
m'embrouille_!' says he, '_Suffit_: _s'm'a la donne_, _et Berthe en etait
bien contente_.'  It struck me as the falling of the curtain or the
closing of the sepulchre doors.

Sure enough, in but a little while after, he fell into a sleep as gentle
as an infant's, which insensibly changed into the sleep of death.  I had
my arm about his body at the time and remarked nothing, unless it were
that he once stretched himself a little, so kindly the end came to that
disastrous life.  It was only at our evening halt that the Major and I
discovered we were travelling alone with the poor clay.  That night we
stole a spade from a field--I think near Market Bosworth--and a little
farther on, in a wood of young oak trees and by the light of King's
lantern, we buried the old soldier of the Empire with both prayers and
tears.

We had needs invent Heaven if it had not been revealed to us; there are
some things that fall so bitterly ill on this side Time!  As for the
Major, I have long since forgiven him.  He broke the news to the poor
Colonel's daughter; I am told he did it kindly; and sure, nobody could
have done it without tears!  His share of purgatory will be brief; and in
this world, as I could not very well praise him, I have suppressed his
name.  The Colonel's also, for the sake of his parole.  _Requiescat_.

CHAPTER XV--THE ADVENTURE OF THE ATTORNEY'S CLERK

I have mentioned our usual course, which was to eat in inconsiderable
wayside hostelries, known to King.  It was a dangerous business; we went
daily under fire to satisfy our appetite, and put our head in the loin's
mouth for a piece of bread.  Sometimes, to minimise the risk, we would
all dismount before we came in view of the house, straggle in severally,
and give what orders we pleased, like disconnected strangers.  In like
manner we departed, to find the cart at an appointed place, some half a
mile beyond.  The Colonel and the Major had each a word or two of
English--God help their pronunciation!  But they did well enough to order
a rasher and a pot or call a reckoning; and, to say truth, these country
folks did not give themselves the pains, and had scarce the knowledge, to
be critical.

About nine or ten at night the pains of hunger and cold drove us to an
alehouse in the flats of Bedfordshire, not far from Bedford itself.  In
the inn kitchen was a long, lean, characteristic-looking fellow of
perhaps forty, dressed in black.  He sat on a settle by the fireside,
smoking a long pipe, such as they call a yard of clay.  His hat and wig
were hanged upon the knob behind him, his head as bald as a bladder of
lard, and his expression very shrewd, cantankerous, and inquisitive.  He
seemed to value himself above his company, to give himself the airs of a
man of the world among that rustic herd; which was often no more than his
due; being, as I afterwards discovered, an attorney's clerk.  I took upon
myself the more ungrateful part of arriving last; and by the time I
entered on the scene the Major was already served at a side table.  Some
general conversation must have passed, and I smelled danger in the air.
The Major looked flustered, the attorney's clerk triumphant, and three or
four peasants in smock-frocks (who sat about the fire to play chorus) had
let their pipes go out.

'Give you good evening, sir!' said the attorney's clerk to me.

'The same to you, sir,' said I.

'I think this one will do,' quoth the clerk to the yokels with a wink;
and then, as soon as I had given my order, 'Pray, sir, whither are you
bound?' he added.

'Sir,' said I, 'I am not one of those who speak either of their business
or their destination in houses of public entertainment.'

'A good answer,' said he, 'and an excellent principle.  Sir, do you speak
French?'

'Why, no, sir,' said I.  'A little Spanish at your service.'

'But you know the French accent, perhaps?' said the clerk.

'Well do I do that!' said I.  'The French accent?  Why, I believe I can
tell a Frenchman in ten words.'

'Here is a puzzle for you, then!' he said.  'I have no material doubt
myself, but some of these gentlemen are more backward.  The lack of
education, you know.  I make bold to say that a man cannot walk, cannot
hear, and cannot see, without the blessings of education.'

He turned to the Major, whose food plainly stuck in his throat.

'Now, sir,' pursued the clerk, 'let me have the pleasure to hear your
voice again.  Where are you going, did you say?'

'Sare, I am go-ing to Lon-don,' said the Major.

I could have flung my plate at him to be such an ass, and to have so
little a gift of languages where that was the essential.

'What think ye of that?' said the clerk.  'Is that French enough?'

'Good God!' cried I, leaping up like one who should suddenly perceive an
acquaintance, 'is this you, Mr. Dubois?  Why, who would have dreamed of
encountering you so far from home?'  As I spoke, I shook hands with the
Major heartily; and turning to our tormentor, 'Oh, sir, you may be
perfectly reassured!  This is a very honest fellow, a late neighbour of
mine in the city of Carlisle.'

I thought the attorney looked put out; I little knew the man!

'But he is French,' said he, 'for all that?'

'Ay, to be sure!' said I.  'A Frenchman of the emigration!  None of your
Buonaparte lot.  I will warrant his views of politics to be as sound as
your own.'

'What is a little strange,' said the clerk quietly, 'is that Mr. Dubois
should deny it.'

I got it fair in the face, and took it smiling; but the shock was rude,
and in the course of the next words I contrived to do what I have rarely
done, and make a slip in my English.  I kept my liberty and life by my
proficiency all these months, and for once that I failed, it is not to be
supposed that I would make a public exhibition of the details.  Enough,
that it was a very little error, and one that might have passed
ninety-nine times in a hundred.  But my limb of the law was as swift to
pick it up as though he had been by trade a master of languages.

'Aha!' cries he; 'and you are French, too!  Your tongue bewrays you.  Two
Frenchmen coming into an alehouse, severally and accidentally, not
knowing each other, at ten of the clock at night, in the middle of
Bedfordshire?  No, sir, that shall not pass!  You are all prisoners
escaping, if you are nothing worse.  Consider yourselves under arrest.  I
have to trouble you for your papers.'

'Where is your warrant, if you come to that?' said I.  'My papers!  A
likely thing that I would show my papers on the _ipse dixit_ of an
unknown fellow in a hedge alehouse!'

'Would you resist the law?' says he.

'Not the law, sir!' said I.  'I hope I am too good a subject for that.
But for a nameless fellow with a bald head and a pair of gingham
small-clothes, why certainly!  'Tis my birthright as an Englishman.
Where's _Magna Charta_, else?'

'We will see about that,' says he; and then, addressing the assistants,
'where does the constable live?'

'Lord love you, sir!' cried the landlord, 'what are you thinking of?  The
constable at past ten at night!  Why, he's abed and asleep, and good and
drunk two hours agone!'

'Ah that a' be!' came in chorus from the yokels.

The attorney's clerk was put to a stand.  He could not think of force;
there was little sign of martial ardour about the landlord, and the
peasants were indifferent--they only listened, and gaped, and now