Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

by Robert Louis Stevenson

  ‘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 ripping 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.’

  ‘This is very silly,’ said Nance, with a movement of her shoulders.

  ‘I do not think it so,’ said Mr. Ar
cher.

  ‘And then,’ she resumed, ‘if you are to try your fortune, why not evenly?’

  ‘Nay,’ returned Mr. Archer with a smile, ‘no man can put complete reliance in blind fate; he must still cog the dice.’

  By this time he had got upon the rock beside the upper fall, and, bidding her look out, dropped a piece of rush into the middle of the intake. The rusty fragment was sucked at once over the fall, came up again far on the right hand, leaned ever more and more in the same direction, and disappeared under the hanging grasses on the castle side.

  ‘One,’ said Mr. Archer, ‘one for standing still.’

  But the next launch had a different fate, and after hanging for a while about the edge of the stagnant water, steadily approached the bleaching-green and danced down the rapid under Nance’s eyes.

  ‘One for me,’ she cried with some exultation; and then she observed that Mr. Archer had grown pale, and was kneeling on the rock, with his hand raised like a person petrified. ‘Why,’ said she, ‘you do not mind it, do you?’

  ‘Does a man not mind a throw of dice by which a fortune hangs?’ said Mr. Archer, rather hoarsely. ‘And this is more than fortune. Nance, if you have any kindness for my fate, put up a prayer before I launch the next one.’

  ‘A prayer,’ she cried, ‘about a game like this? I would not be so heathen.’

  ‘Well,’ said he, ‘then without,’ and he closed his eyes and dropped the piece of rush. This time there was no doubt. It went for the rapid as straight as any arrow.

  ‘Action then!’ said Mr. Archer, getting to his feet; ‘and then God forgive us,’ he added, almost to himself.

  ‘God forgive us, indeed,’ cried Nance, ‘for wasting the good daylight! But come, Mr. Archer, if I see you look so serious I shall begin to think you was in earnest.’

  ‘Nay,’ he said, turning upon her suddenly, with a full smile; ‘but is not this good advice? I have consulted God and demigod; the nymph of the river, and what I far more admire and trust, my blue-eyed Minerva. Both have said the same. My own heart was telling it already. Action, then, be mine; and into the deep sea with all this paralysing casuistry. I am happy to-day for the first time.’

  CHAPTER VIII — THE MAIL GUARD

  Somewhere about two in the morning a squall had burst upon the castle, a clap of screaming wind that made the towers rock, and a copious drift of rain that streamed from the windows. The wind soon blew itself out, but the day broke cloudy and dripping, and when the little party assembled at breakfast their humours appeared to have changed with the change of weather. Nance had been brooding on the scene at the river-side, applying it in various ways to her particular aspirations, and the result, which was hardly to her mind, had taken the colour out of her cheeks. Mr. Archer, too, was somewhat absent, his thoughts were of a mingled strain; and even upon his usually impassive countenance there were betrayed successive depths of depression and starts of exultation, which the girl translated in terms of her own hopes and fears. But Jonathan was the most altered: he was strangely silent, hardly passing a word, and watched Mr. Archer with an eager and furtive eye. It seemed as if the idea that had so long hovered before him had now taken a more solid shape, and, while it still attracted, somewhat alarmed his imagination.

  At this rate, conversation languished into a silence which was only broken by the gentle and ghostly noises of the rain on the stone roof and about all that field of ruins; and they were all relieved when the note of a man whistling and the sound of approaching footsteps in the grassy court announced a visitor. It was the ostler from the ‘Green Dragon’ bringing a letter for Mr. Archer. Nance saw her hero’s face contract and then relax again at sight of it; and she thought that she knew why, for the sprawling, gross black characters of the address were easily distinguishable from the fine writing on the former letter that had so much disturbed him. He opened it and began to read; while the ostler sat down to table with a pot of ale, and proceeded to make himself agreeable after his fashion.

  ‘Fine doings down our way, Miss Nance,’ said he. ‘I haven’t been abed this blessed night.’

  Nance expressed a polite interest, but her eye was on Mr. Archer, who was reading his letter with a face of such extreme indifference that she was tempted to suspect him of assumption.

  ‘Yes,’ continued the ostler, ‘not been the like of it this fifteen years: the North Mail stopped at the three stones.’

  Jonathan’s cup was at his lip, but at this moment he choked with a great splutter; and Mr. Archer, as if startled by the noise, made so sudden a movement that one corner of the sheet tore off and stayed between his finger and thumb. It was some little time before the old man was sufficiently recovered to beg the ostler to go on, and he still kept coughing and crying and rubbing his eyes. Mr. Archer, on his side, laid the letter down, and, putting his hands in his pocket, listened gravely to the tale.

  ‘Yes,’ resumed Sam, ‘the North Mail was stopped by a single horseman; dash my wig, but I admire him! There were four insides and two out, and poor Tom Oglethorpe, the guard. Tom showed himself a man; let fly his blunderbuss at him; had him covered, too, and could swear to that; but the Captain never let on, up with a pistol and fetched poor Tom a bullet through the body. Tom, he squelched upon the seat, all over blood. Up comes the Captain to the window. “Oblige me,” says he, “with what you have.” Would you believe it? Not a man says cheep! — not them. “Thy hands over thy head.” Four watches, rings, snuff-boxes, seven-and-forty pounds overhead in gold. One Dicksee, a grazier, tries it on: gives him a guinea. “Beg your pardon,” says the Captain, “I think too highly of you to take it at your hand. I will not take less than ten from such a gentleman.” This Dicksee had his money in his stocking, but there was the pistol at his eye. Down he goes, offs with his stocking, and there was thirty golden guineas. “Now,” says the Captain, “you’ve tried it on with me, but I scorns the advantage. Ten I said,” he says, “and ten I take.” So, dash my buttons, I call that man a man!’ cried Sam in cordial admiration.

  ‘Well, and then?’ says Mr. Archer.

  ‘Then,’ resumed Sam, ‘that old fat fagot Engleton, him as held the ribbons and drew up like a lamb when he was told to, picks up his cattle, and drives off again. Down they came to the “Dragon,” all singing like as if they was scalded, and poor Tom saying nothing. You would ‘a’ thought they had all lost the King’s crown to hear them. Down gets this Dicksee. “Postmaster,” he says, taking him by the arm, “this is a most abominable thing,” he says. Down gets a Major Clayton, and gets the old man by the other arm. “We’ve been robbed,” he cries, “robbed!” Down gets the others, and all around the old man telling their story, and what they had lost, and how they was all as good as ruined; till at last Old Engleton says, says he, “How about Oglethorpe?” says he. “Ay,” says the others, “how about the guard?” Well, with that we bousted him down, as white as a rag and all blooded like a sop. I thought he was dead. Well, he ain’t dead; but he’s dying, I fancy.’

  ‘Did you say four watches?’ said Jonathan.

  ‘Four, I think. I wish it had been forty,’ cried Sam. ‘Such a party of soused herrings I never did see — not a man among them bar poor Tom. But us that are the servants on the road have all the risk and none of the profit.’

  ‘And this brave fellow,’ asked Mr. Archer, very quietly, ‘this Oglethorpe — how is he now?’

  ‘Well, sir, with my respects, I take it he has a hole bang through him,’ said Sam. ‘The doctor hasn’t been yet. He’d ‘a’ been bright and early if it had been a passenger. But, doctor or no, I’ll make a good guess that Tom won’t see to-morrow. He’ll die on a Sunday, will poor Tom; and they do say that’s fortunate.’

  ‘Did Tom see him that did it?’ asked Jonathan.

  ‘Well, he saw him,’ replied Sam, ‘but not to swear by. Said he was a very tall man, and very big, and had a ‘ankerchief about his face, and a very quick shot, and sat his horse like a thorough gentleman, as he is.’

  ‘A gentlem
an!’ cried Nance. ‘The dirty knave!’

  ‘Well, I calls a man like that a gentleman,’ returned the ostler; ‘that’s what I mean by a gentleman.’

  ‘You don’t know much of them, then,’ said Nance.

  ‘A gentleman would scorn to stoop to such a thing. I call my uncle a better gentleman than any thief.’

  ‘And you would be right,’ said Mr. Archer.

  ‘How many snuff-boxes did he get?’ asked Jonathan.

  ‘O, dang me if I know,’ said Sam; ‘I didn’t take an inventory.’

  ‘I will go back with you, if you please,’ said Mr. Archer. ‘I should like to see poor Oglethorpe. He has behaved well.’

  ‘At your service, sir,’ said Sam, jumping to his feet. ‘I dare to say a gentleman like you would not forget a poor fellow like Tom — no, nor a plain man like me, sir, that went without his sleep to nurse him. And excuse me, sir,’ added Sam, ‘you won’t forget about the letter neither?’

  ‘Surely not,’ said Mr. Archer.

  Oglethorpe lay in a low bed, one of several in a long garret of the inn. The rain soaked in places through the roof and fell in minute drops; there was but one small window; the beds were occupied by servants, the air of the garret was both close and chilly. Mr. Archer’s heart sank at the threshold to see a man lying perhaps mortally hurt in so poor a sick-room, and as he drew near the low bed he took his hat off. The guard was a big, blowsy, innocent-looking soul with a thick lip and a broad nose, comically turned up; his cheeks were crimson, and when Mr. Archer laid a finger on his brow he found him burning with fever.

  ‘I fear you suffer much,’ he said, with a catch in his voice, as he sat down on the bedside.

  ‘I suppose I do, sir,’ returned Oglethorpe; ‘it is main sore.’