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

“Stop him!” my cousin bawled. “Stop the balloon! It’s Champdivers, the murderer!”

“Cut the ropes!” vociferated Byfield; and to my infinite relief I saw that Dalmahoy was doing his best. A hand clutched at my heel. I let out viciously, amid a roar of the crowd; felt the kick reach and rattle home on somebody’s teeth; and, as the crowd made a rush and the balloon swayed and shot upwards, heaved myself over the rim into the car.

Recovering myself on the instant, I bent over. I had on my tongue a neat farewell for Alain, but the sight of a hundred upturned and contorted faces silenced me as a blow might. There had lain my real peril, in the sudden wild-beast rage now suddenly baffled. I read it, as clear as print, and sickened. Nor was Alain in a posture to listen. My kick had sent Moleskin flying on top of him; and borne to earth, prone beneath the superincumbent bulk of his retainer, he lay with hands outspread like a swimmer’s and nose buried in the plashy soil.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE INCOMPLETE AËRONAUTS

All this I took in at a glance: I dare say in three seconds or less. The hubbub beneath us dropped to a low, rumbling bass. Suddenly a woman’s scream divided it – one high-pitched, penetrating scream, followed by silence. And then, as a pack of hounds will start into cry, voice after voice caught up the scream and reduplicated it until the whole enclosure rang with alarm.

“Hullo!” Byfield called to me: “what the deuce is happening now?” and ran to his side of the car. “Good Lord, it’s Dalmahoy!”

It was. Beneath us, at the tail of a depending rope, that unhappy lunatic dangled between earth and sky. He had been the first to cut the tether; and, having severed it below his grasp, had held on while the others cut loose, taking even the asinine precaution to loop the end twice round his wrist. Of course the upward surge of the balloon had heaved him off his feet, and his muddled instinct did the rest. Clutching now with both hands, he was borne aloft like a lamb from the flock.

So we reasoned afterwards. “The grapnel!” gasped Byfield: for Dalmahoy’s rope was fastened beneath the floor of the car, and not to be reached by us. We fumbled to cast the grapnel loose, and shouted down together —

“For God’s sake hold on! Catch the anchor when it comes! You’ll break your neck if you drop!”

He swung into sight again beyond the edge of the floor, and uplifted a strained, white face.

We cast loose the grapnel, lowered it and jerked it towards him. He swung past it like a pendulum, caught at it with one hand, and missed: came flying back on the receding curve, and missed again. At the third attempt he blundered right against it, and flung an arm over one of the flukes, next a leg, and in a trice we were hauling up, hand over hand.

We dragged him inboard. He was pale, but undefeatedly voluble.

“Must apologise to you fellows, really. Dam silly, clumsy kind of thing to do; might have been awkward too. Thank you, Byfield, my boy, I will: two fingers only – a harmless steadier.”

He took the flask and was lifting it. But his jaw dropped and his hand hung arrested.

“He’s going to faint,” I cried. “The strain – ”

“Strain on your grandmother, Ducie! What’s that?”

He was staring past my shoulder, and on the instant I was aware of a voice – not the aëronaut’s – speaking behind me, and, as it were, out of the clouds —

“I tak’ ye to witness, Mister Byfield – ”

Consider, if you please. For six days I had been oscillating within a pretty complete circumference of alarms. It is small blame to me, I hope, that with my nerve on so nice a pivot, I quivered and swung to this new apprehension like a needle in a compass-box.

On the floor of the car, at my feet, lay a heap of plaid rugs and overcoats, from which, successively and painfully disinvolved, there emerged first a hand clutching a rusty beaver hat, next a mildly indignant face, in spectacles, and finally the rearward of a very small man in a seedy suit of black. He rose on his knees, his finger-tips resting on the floor, and contemplated the aëronaut over his glasses with a world of reproach.

“I tak’ ye to witness, Mr. Byfield!”

Byfield mopped a perspiring brow.

“My dear sir,” he stammered, “all a mistake – no fault of mine – explain presently”; then, as one catching at an inspiration, “Allow me to introduce you. Mr. Dalmahoy, Mr. – ”

“My name is Sheepshanks,” said the little man stiffly. “But you’ll excuse me – ”

Mr. Dalmahoy interrupted with a playful cat-call.

“Hear, hear! Silence! ‘His name is Sheepshanks. On the Grampian Hills his father kept his flocks – a thousand sheep,’ and, I make no doubt, shanks in proportion. Excuse you, Sheepshanks? My dear sir! At this altitude one shank was more than we had a right to expect: the plural multiplies the obligation.” Keeping a tight hold on his hysteria, Dalmahoy steadied himself by a rope and bowed.

“And I, sir,” – as Mr. Sheepshanks’ thoroughly bewildered gaze travelled around and met mine – “I, sir, am the Vicomte Anne de Kéroual de Saint-Yves, at your service. I haven’t a notion how or why you come to be here: but you seem likely to be an acquisition. On my part,” I continued, as there leapt into my mind the stanza I had vainly tried to recover in Mrs. McRankine’s sitting-room, “I have the honour to refer you to the inimitable Roman, Flaccus —

“‘Virtus, recludens immeritis mori
Coelum negata temptat iter via,
Coetusque vulgares et udam
Spernit humum fugiente penna’

– you have the Latin, sir?”

“Not a word.” He subsided upon the pile of rugs and spread out his hands in protest. “I tak’ ye to witness, Mr. Byfield!”

“Then in a minute or so I will do myself the pleasure of construing,” said I, and turned to scan the earth we were leaving – I had not guessed how rapidly.

We contemplated it from the height of six hundred feet – or so Byfield asserted after consulting his barometer. He added that this was a mere nothing: the wonder was the balloon had risen at all with one-half of the total folly of Edinburgh clinging to the car. I passed the possible inaccuracy and certain ill-temper of this calculation. He had (he explained) made jettison of at least a hundred-weight of sand ballast. I could only hope it had fallen on my cousin. To me, six hundred feet appeared a very respectable eminence. And the view was ravishing.

The Lunardi, mounting through a stagnant calm in a line almost vertical, had pierced the morning mists, and now swam emancipated in a heaven of exquisite blue. Below us, by some trick of eyesight, the country had grown concave, its horizons curving up like the rim of a shallow bowl – a bowl heaped, in point of fact, with sea-fog, but to our eyes with a froth delicate and dazzling as a whipped syllabub of snow. Upon it the travelling shadow of the balloon became no shadow but a stain: an amethyst (you might call it) purged of all grosser properties than colour and lucency. At times thrilled by no perceptible wind, rather by the pulse of the sun’s rays, the froth shook and parted: and then behold, deep in the crevasses, vignetted and shining, an acre or two of the earth of man’s business and fret – tilled slopes of the Lothians, ships dotted on the Forth, the capital like a hive that some child had smoked – the ear of fancy could almost hear it buzzing.

I snatched the glass from Byfield, and brought it to focus upon one of these peepshow rifts: and lo! at the foot of the shaft, imaged, as it were, far down in a luminous well, a green hillside and three figures standing. A white speck fluttered; and fluttered until the rift closed again. Flora’s handkerchief! Blessings on the brave hand that waved it! – at a moment when (as I have since heard and knew without need of hearing) her heart was down in her shoes, or, to speak accurately, in the milkmaid Janet’s. Singular in many things, she was at one with the rest of her sex in its native and incurable distrust of man’s inventions.

I am bound to say that my own faith in aërostatics was a plant – a sensitive plant – of extremely tender growth. Either I failed, a while back, in painting the emotions of my descent of the Devil’s Elbow, or the reader knows that I am a chicken-hearted fellow about a height. I make him a present of the admission. Set me on a plane superficies, and I will jog with all the insouciance of a rolling stone: toss me in air, and, with the stone in the child’s adage, I am in the hands of the devil. Even to the qualified instability of a sea-going ship I have ever committed myself with resignation rather than confidence.

But to my unspeakable relief the Lunardi floated upwards, and continued to float, almost without a tremor. Only by reading the barometer, or by casting scraps of paper overboard, could we tell that the machine moved at all. Now and again we revolved slowly: so Byfield’s compass informed us, but for ourselves we had never guessed it. Of dizziness I felt no longer a symptom, for the sufficient reason that the provocatives were nowhere at hand. We were the only point in space, without possibility of comparison with another. We were made one with the clean silences receiving us; and speaking only for the Vicomte Anne de Saint-Yves, I dare assert that for five minutes a newly bathed infant had not been less conscious of original sin.

“But look here, you know” – it was Byfield at my elbow – “I’m a public character, by George; and this puts me in a devilish awkward position.”

“So it does,” I agreed. “You proclaimed yourself a solitary voyager: and here, to the naked eye, are four of us.”

“And pray how can I help that? If, at the last moment, a couple of lunatics come rushing in – ”

“They still leave Sheepshanks to be accounted for.” Byfield began to irritate me. I turned to the stowaway. “Perhaps,” said I, “Mr. Sheepshanks will explain.”

“I paid in advance,” Mr. Sheepshanks began, eager to seize the opening presented. “The fact is, I’m a married man.”

“Already at two points you have the advantage of us. Proceed, sir.”

“You were good enough, just now, to give me your name, Mr. – ”

“The Vicomte Anne de Kéroual de Saint-Yves.”

“It is a somewhat difficult name to remember.”

“If that be all, sir, within two minutes you shall have a memoria technica prepared for use during the voyage.”

Mr. Sheepshanks harked back. “I am a married man, and – d’ye see? – Mrs. Sheepshanks, as you might say, has no sympathy with ballooning. She was a Guthrie of Dumfries.”

“Which accounts for it, to be sure,” said I.