The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 20

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

“You approve it, then?” said I.

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

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

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

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

“Mountebank!” he murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

“He might not accept,” said Romaine.

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

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

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

“You are pleased to be facetious, sir,” said I, “and not according to knowledge. These clothes are my life, they are my disguise; and since I can take but few of them, I were a fool indeed if I selected hastily! Will you understand, once and for all, what I am seeking? To be invisible is the first point; the second, to be invisible in a post-chaise and with a servant. Can you not perceive the delicacy of the quest? Nothing must be too coarse, nothing too fine; rien de voyant, rien qui détonne; so that I may leave everywhere the inconspicuous image of a handsome young man of a good fortune travelling in proper style, whom the landlord will forget in twelve hours – and the chambermaid perhaps remember, God bless her! with a sigh. This is the very fine art of dress.”

“I have practised it with success for fifty years,” said Romaine, with a chuckle. “A black suit and a clean shirt is my infallible recipe.”

“You surprise me; I did not think you would be shallow!” said I, lingering between two coats. “Pray, Mr. Romaine, have I your head? or did you travel post and with a smartish servant?”

“Neither, I admit,” said he.

“Which change the whole problem,” I continued. “I have to dress for a smartish servant and a Russia leather despatch-box.” That brought me to a stand. I came over and looked at the box with a moment’s hesitation. “Yes,” I resumed. “Yes, and for the despatch-box! It looks moneyed and landed; it means I have a lawyer. It is an invaluable property. But I could have wished it to hold less money. The responsibility is crushing. Should I not do more wisely to take five hundred pounds, and intrust the remainder with you, Mr. Romaine?”

“If you are sure you will not want it,” answered Romaine.

“I am far from sure of that,” cried I. “In the first place, as a philosopher. This is the first time that I have been at the head of a large sum, and it is conceivable – who knows himself? – that I may make it fly. In the second place, as a fugitive. Who knows what I may need? The whole of it may be inadequate. But I can always write for more.”

“You do not understand,” he replied. “I break off all communication with you here and now. You must give me a power of attorney ere you start to-night, and then be done with me trenchantly until better days.”

I believe I offered some objection.

“Think a little for once of me!” said Romaine. “I must not have seen you before to-night. To-night we are to have had our only interview, and you are to have given me the power; and to-night I am to have lost sight of you again – I know not whither, you were upon business, it was none of my affairs to question you! And this, you are to remark, in the interests of your own safety much more than mine.”

“I am not even to write to you?” I said, a little bewildered.

“I believe I am cutting the last strand that connects you with common-sense,” he replied. “But that is the plain English of it. You are not even to write; and if you did, I would not answer.”

“A letter, however – ” I began.

“Listen to me,” interrupted Romaine. “So soon as your cousin reads the paragraph, what will he do? Put the police upon looking into my correspondence! So soon as you write to me, in short, you write to Bow Street; and if you will take my advice, you will date that letter from France.”

“The devil!” said I, for I began suddenly to see that this might put me out of the way of my business.

“What is it now?” says he.

“There will be more to be done, then, before we can part,” I answered.

“I give you the whole night,” said he. “So long as you are off ere daybreak, I am content.”

“In short, Mr. Romaine,” said I, “I have had so much benefit of your advice and services that I am loth to sever the connection, and would even ask a substitute. I would be obliged for a letter of introduction to one of your own cloth in Edinburgh – an old man for choice, very experienced, very respectable, and very secret. Could you favour me with such a letter?”

“Why, no,” said he. “Certainly not. I will do no such thing, indeed.”

“It would be a great favour, sir,” I pleaded.

“It would be an unpardonable blunder,” he replied. “What? Give you a letter of introduction? and when the police come, I suppose, I must forget the circumstance? No, indeed. Talk of it no more.”

“You seem to be always in the right,” said I. “The letter would be out of the question, I quite see that. But the lawyer’s name might very well have dropped from you in the way of conversation; having heard him mentioned, I might profit by the circumstance to introduce myself; and in this way my business would be the better done, and you not in the least compromised.”

“What is this business?” said Romaine.

“I have not said that I had any,” I replied. “It might arise. This is only a possibility that I must keep in view.”

“Well,” said he, with a gesture of the hands, “I mention Mr. Robbie; and let that be an end of it! – Or wait!” he added, “I have it. Here is something that will serve you for an introduction, and cannot compromise me.” And he wrote his name and the Edinburgh lawyer’s address on a piece of card and tossed it to me.

CHAPTER XXI

I BECOME THE OWNER OF A CLARET-COLOURED CHAISE

What with packing, signing papers, and partaking of an excellent cold supper in the lawyer’s room, it was past two in the morning before we were ready for the road. Romaine himself let us out of a window in a part of the house known to Rowley: it appears it served as a kind of postern to the servants’ hall, by which (when they were in the mind for a clandestine evening) they would come regularly in and out; and I remember very well the vinegar aspect of the lawyer on the receipt of this piece of information – how he pursed his lips, jutted his eyebrows, and kept repeating, “This must be seen to, indeed! this shall be barred to-morrow in the morning!” In this preoccupation I believe he took leave of me without observing it; our things were handed out; we heard the window shut behind us; and became instantly lost in a horrid intricacy of blackness and the shadow of woods.

A little wet snow kept sleepily falling, pausing, and falling again; it seemed perpetually beginning to snow and perpetually leaving off; and the darkness was intense. Time and again we walked into trees; time and again found ourselves adrift among garden borders or stuck like a ram in the thicket. Rowley had possessed himself of the matches, and he was neither to be terrified nor softened. “No, I will not, Mr. Anne, sir,” he would reply. “You know he tell me to wait till we were over the ’ill. It’s only a little way now. Why, and I thought you was a soldier, too!” I was at least a very glad soldier when my valet consented at last to kindle a thieves’ match. From this we easily lit the lantern: and thenceforward, through a labyrinth of woodland paths, were conducted by its uneasy glimmer. Both booted and great-coated, with tall hats much of a shape, and laden with booty in the form of a despatch-box, a case of pistols, and two plump valises, I thought we had very much the look of a pair of brothers returning from the sack of Amersham Place.

We issued at last upon a country by-road where we might walk abreast and without precaution. It was nine miles to Aylesbury, our immediate destination; by a watch, which formed part of my new outfit, it should be about half-past three in the morning; and as we did not choose to arrive before daylight, time could not be said to press. I gave the order to march at ease.

“Now, Rowley,” said I, “so far so good. You have come, in the most obliging manner in the world, to carry these valises. The question is, what next? What are we to do at Aylesbury? or, more particularly, what are you? Thence, I go on a journey. Are you to accompany me?”

He gave a little chuckle. “That’s all settled already, Mr. Anne, sir,” he replied. “Why, I’ve got my things here in the valise – a half a dozen shirts and what not; I’m all ready, sir: just you lead on: you’ll see.”

“The devil you have!” said I. “You made pretty sure of your welcome.”