The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 21

This was a mystery beyond Nance’s penetration, and she stared in wonder as she made the porridge.

“I want to live,” he continued, “I want to live and to grow rich. I want to drive my carriage and to dice in hells and see the ring, I do. Is this a life that I lived? I want to be a rake, d’ye understand? I want to know what things are like. I don’t want to die like a blind kitten, and me seventy-six.”

“O fie!” said Nance.

The old man thrust out his jaw at her, with the grimace of an irreverent schoolboy. Upon that aged face it seemed a blasphemy. Then he took out of his bosom a long leather purse, and emptying its contents on the settle, began to count and recount the pieces, ringing and examining each, and suddenly he leapt like a young man. “What!” he screamed. “Bad? O Lord! I’m robbed again!” And falling on his knees before the settle he began to pour forth the most dreadful curses on the head of his deceiver. His eyes were shut, for to him this vile solemnity was prayer. He held up the bad half-crown in his right hand, as though he were displaying it to Heaven, and what increased the horror of the scene, the curses he invoked were those whose efficacy he had tasted – old age and poverty, rheumatism and an ungrateful son. Nance listened appalled; then she sprang forward and dragged down his arm and laid her hand upon his mouth.

“Whist!” she cried. “Whist ye, for God’s sake! O my man, whist ye! If Heaven were to hear; if poor Aunt Susan were to hear! Think, she may be listening.” And with the histrionism of strong emotion she pointed to a corner of the kitchen.

His eyes followed her finger. He looked there for a little, thinking, blinking; then he got stiffly to his feet and resumed his place upon the settle, the bad piece still in his hand. So he sat for some time, looking upon the half-crown, and now wondering to himself on the injustice and partiality of the law, now computing again and again the nature of his loss. So he was still sitting when Mr. Archer entered the kitchen. At this a light came into his face, and after some seconds of rumination he despatched Nance upon an errand.

“Mr. Archer,” said he, as soon as they were alone together, “would you give me a guinea-piece for silver?”

“Why, sir, I believe I can,” said Mr. Archer.

And the exchange was just effected when Nance re-entered the apartment. The blood shot into her face.

“What’s to do here?” she asked rudely.

“Nothing, my dearie,” said old Jonathan, with a touch of whine.

“What’s to do?” she said again.

“Your uncle was but changing me a piece of gold,“ returned Mr. Archer.

“Let me see what he hath given you, Mr. Archer,” replied the girl. “I had a bad piece, and I fear it is mixed up among the good.”

“Well, well,” replied Mr. Archer, smiling, “I must take the merchant’s risk of it. The money is now mixed.”

“I know my piece,” quoth Nance. “Come, let me see your silver, Mr. Archer. If I have to get it by a theft I’ll see that money,” she cried.

“Nay, child, if you put as much passion to be honest as the world to steal, I must give way, though I betray myself,” said Mr. Archer. “There it is as I received it.”

Nance quickly found the bad half-crown.

“Give him another,” she said, looking Jonathan in the face; and when that had been done, she walked over to the chimney and flung the guilty piece into the reddest of the fire. Its base constituents began immediately to run; even as she watched it the disc crumbled, and the lineaments of the King became confused. Jonathan, who had followed close behind, beheld these changes from over her shoulder, and his face darkened sorely.

“Now,” said she, “come back to table, and to-day it is I that shall say grace, as I used to do in the old times, day about with Dick”; and covering her eyes with one hand, “O Lord,” said she with deep emotion, “make us thankful; and, O Lord, deliver us from evil! For the love of the poor souls that watch for us in heaven, O deliver us from evil.”

CHAPTER VII

THE BLEACHING-GREEN

The year moved on to March; and March, though it blew bitter keen from the North Sea, yet blinked kindly between whiles on the river dell. The mire dried up in the closest covert; life ran in the bare branches, and the air of the afternoon would be suddenly sweet with the fragrance of new grass.

Above and below the castle the river crooked like the letter “S.” The lower loop was to the left, and embraced the high and steep projection which was crowned by the ruins; the upper loop enclosed a lawny promontory, fringed by thorn and willow. It was easy to reach it from the castle side, for the river ran in this part very quietly among innumerable boulders and over dam-like walls of rock. The place was all enclosed, the wind a stranger, the turf smooth and solid; so it was chosen by Nance to be her bleaching-green.

One day she brought a bucketful of linen, and had but begun to wring and lay them out when Mr. Archer stepped from the thicket on the far side, drew very deliberately near, and sat down in silence on the grass. Nance looked up to greet him with a smile, but finding her smile was not returned, she fell into embarrassment and stuck the more busily to her employment. Man or woman, the whole world looks well at any work to which they are accustomed; but the girl was ashamed of what she did. She was ashamed, besides, of the sun-bonnet that so well became her, and ashamed of her bare arms, which were her greatest beauty.

“Nausicaa,” said Mr. Archer at last, “I find you like Nausicaa.”

“And who was she?” asked Nance, and laughed in spite of herself, an empty and embarrassed laugh, that sounded in Mr. Archer’s ears, indeed, like music, but to her own like the last grossness of rusticity.

“She was a princess of the Grecian islands,” he replied. “A king, being shipwrecked, found her washing by the shore. Certainly I, too, was shipwrecked,” he continued, plucking at the grass. “There was never a more desperate castaway – to fall from polite life, fortune, a shrine of honour, a grateful conscience, duties willingly taken up and faithfully discharged; and to fall to this – idleness, poverty, inutility, remorse.” He seemed to have forgotten her presence, but here he remembered her again. “Nance,” said he, “would you have a man sit down and suffer or rise up and strive?”

“Nay,” she said. “I would always rather see him doing.”

“Ha!” said Mr. Archer, “but yet you speak from an imperfect knowledge. Conceive a man damned to a choice of only evil – misconduct upon either side, not a fault behind him, and yet naught before him but this choice of sins. How would you say then?”

“I would say that he was much deceived, Mr. Archer,” returned Nance. “I would say there was a third choice, and that the right one.“

“I tell you,” said Mr. Archer, “the man I have in view hath two ways open, and no more. One to wait, like a poor mewling baby, till Fate save or ruin him; the other to take his troubles in his hand, and to perish or be saved at once. It is no point of morals; both are wrong. Either way this step-child of Providence must fall; which shall he choose, by doing or not doing?”

“Fall, then, is what I would say,” replied Nance. “Fall where you will, but do it! For O, Mr. Archer,” she continued, stooping to her work, “you that are good and kind, and so wise, it doth sometimes go against my heart to see you live on here like a sheep in a turnip-field! If you were braver – ” and here she paused, conscience-smitten.

“Do I, indeed, lack courage?” inquired Mr. Archer of himself. “Courage, the footstool of the virtues, upon which they stand? Courage, that a poor private carrying a musket has to spare of; that does not fail a weasel or a rat; that is a brutish faculty? I to fail there, I wonder? But what is courage, then? The constancy to endure oneself or to see others suffer? The itch of ill-advised activity: mere shuttle-wittedness, or to be still and patient? To inquire of the significance of words is to rob ourselves of what we seem to know, and yet, of all things, certainly to stand still is the least heroic. Nance,” he said, “did you ever hear of Hamlet?”

“Never,” said Nance.

“’Tis an old play,” returned Mr. Archer, “and frequently enacted. This while I have been talking Hamlet. You must know this Hamlet was a Prince among the Danes,” and he told her the play in a very good style, here and there quoting a verse or two with solemn emphasis.

“It is strange,” said Nance; “he was then a very poor creature?”

“That was what he could not tell,” said Mr. Archer. “Look at me, am I as poor a creature?”

She looked, and what she saw was the familiar thought of all her hours; the tall figure very plainly habited in black, the spotless ruffles, the slim hands; the long, well-shapen, serious, shaven face, the wide and somewhat thin-lipped mouth, the dark eyes that were so full of depth and change and colour. He was gazing at her with his brows a little knit, his chin upon one hand and that elbow resting on his knee.

“Ye look a man!” she cried, “ay, and should be a great one! The more shame to you to lie here idle like a dog before the fire.”

“My fair Holdaway,” quoth Mr. Archer, “you are much set on action. I cannot dig, to beg I am ashamed.” He continued, looking at her with a half-absent fixity, “’Tis a strange thing, certainly, that in my years of fortune I should never taste happiness, and now when I am broke, enjoy so much of it, for was I ever happier than to-day? Was the grass softer, the stream pleasanter in sound, the air milder, the heart more at peace? Why should I not sink? To dig – why, after all, it should be easy. To take a mate, too? Love is of all grades since Jupiter; love fails to none; and children” – but here he passed his hand suddenly over his eyes. “O fool and coward, fool and coward!” he said bitterly; “can you forget your fetters? You did not know that I was fettered, Nance?” he asked, again addressing her.

But Nance was somewhat sore. “I know you keep talking,” she said, and, turning half away from him, began to wring out a sheet across her shoulder. “I wonder you are not wearied of your voice. When the hands lie abed the tongue takes a walk.“

Mr. Archer laughed unpleasantly, rose and moved to the water’s edge. In this part the body of the river poured across a little narrow fell, ran some ten feet very smoothly over a bed of pebbles, then getting wind, as it were, of another shelf of rock which barred the channel, began, by imperceptible degrees, to separate towards either shore in dancing currents, and to leave the middle clear and stagnant. The set towards either side was nearly equal; about one half of the whole water plunged on the side of the castle, through a narrow gullet; about one half ran lipping past the margin of the green and slipped across a babbling rapid.

“Here,“ said Mr. Archer, after he had looked for some time at the fine and shifting demarcation of these currents, “come here and see me try my fortune.”

“I am not like a man,” said Nance; “I have no time to waste.”

“Come here,” he said again. “I ask you seriously, Nance. We are not always childish when we seem so.”

She drew a little nearer.

“Now,” said he, “you see these two channels – choose one.”

“I’ll choose the nearest, to save time,” said Nance.

“Well, that shall be for action,” returned Mr. Archer. “And since I wish to have the odds against me, not only the other channel but yon stagnant water in the midst shall be for lying still. You see this?” he continued, pulling up a withered rush. “I break it in three. I shall put each separately at the top of the upper fall, and according as they go by your way or by the other I shall guide my life.”