Two days later we anchored in the great harbour at Boston, where Captain Seccombe went with his story and his prisoners to Commodore Bainbridge, who kept them pending news of Commodore Rodgers. They were sent, a few weeks later, to Newport, Rhode Island, to be interrogated by that commander; and, to the honour of the Republic, were released on a liberal parole; but whether, when the war ended, they returned to England or took oath as American citizens, I have not learned. I was luckier. The Commodore allowed Captain Seccombe to detain me while the French consul made inquiry into my story; and during the two months which the consul thought fit to take over it, I was a guest in the captain’s house. And here I made my bow to Miss Amelia Seccombe, an accomplished young lady, “who,” said her doating father, “has acquired a considerable proficiency in French, and will be glad to swap ideas with you in that language.” Miss Seccombe and I did not hold our communications in French; and, observing her disposition to substitute the warmer language of the glances, I took the bull by the horns, told her my secret, and rhapsodised on Flora. Consequently no Nausicaa figures in this Odyssey of mine. Nay, the excellent girl flung herself into my cause, and bombarded her father and the consular office with such effect that on 2nd February 1814, I waved farewell to her from the deck of the barque Shawmut, bound from Boston to Bordeaux.

CHAPTER XXXV

IN PARIS.—ALAIN PLAYS HIS LAST CARD

On the 10th of March at sunset the Shawmut passed the Pointe de Grave fort and entered the mouth of the Gironde, and at eleven o’clock next morning dropped anchor a little below Blaye, under the guns of the Regulus, 74. We were just in time, a British fleet being daily expected there to co-operate with the Duc d’Angoulème and Count Lynch, who was then preparing to pull the tricolour from his shoulder and betray Bordeaux to Beresford, or, if you prefer it, to the Bourbon. News of his purpose had already travelled down to Blaye, and therefore no sooner were my feet once more on the soil of my beloved France, than I turned them towards Libourne, or rather Fronsac, and the morning after my arrival there, started for the capital.

But so desperately were the joints of travel dislocated (the war having deplenished the country alike of cattle and able-bodied drivers), and so frequent were the breakdowns by the way, that I might as expeditiously have trudged it. It cost me fifteen good days to reach Orleans, and at Étampes (which I reached on the morning of the 30th) the driver of the tottering diligence flatly declined to proceed. The Cossacks and Prussians were at the gates of Paris. “Last night we could see the fires of their bivouacs. If Monsieur listens he can hear the firing.” The Empress had fled from the Tuileries. “Whither?” The driver, the aubergiste, the disinterested crowd, shrugged their shoulders. “To Rambouillet, probably. God knew what was happening or what would happen.” The Emperor was at Troyes, or at Sens, or else as near as Fontainebleau; nobody knew for certain which. But the fugitives from Paris had been pouring in for days, and not a cart or four-footed beast was to be hired for love or money, though I hunted Étampes for hours.

At length, and at nightfall, I ran against a bow-kneed grey mare, and a cabriolet de place, which, by its label, belonged to Paris; the pair wandering the street under what it would be flattery to call the guidance of an eminently drunken driver. I boarded him; he dissolved at once into maudlin tears and prolixity. It appeared that on the 29th he had brought over a bourgeois family from the capital, and had spent the last three days in perambulating Étampes, and the past three nights in crapulous slumber within his vehicle. Here was my chance, and I demanded to know if for a price he would drive me back with him to Paris. He declared, still weeping, that he was fit for anything. “For my part, I am ready to die, and Monsieur knows that we shall never reach.”

“Still, anything is better than Étampes.”

For some inscrutable reason this struck him as excessively comic. He assured me that I was a brave fellow, and bade me jump up at once. Within five minutes we were jolting towards Paris. Our progress was all but inappreciable, for the grey mare had come to the end of her powers, and her master’s monologue kept pace with her. His anecdotes were all of the past three days. The iron of Étampes apparently had entered his soul and effaced all memory of his antecedent career. Of the war, of any recent public events, he could tell me nothing.

I had half expected—supposing the Emperor to be near Fontainebleau—to happen on his vedettes, but we had the road to ourselves, and reached Longjumeau a little before daybreak without having encountered a living creature. Here we knocked up the proprietor of a cabaret, who assured us between yawns that we were going to our doom, and after baiting the grey and dosing ourselves with execrable brandy, pushed forward again. As the sky grew pale about us, I had my ears alert for the sound of artillery. But Paris kept silence. We passed Sceaux, and arrived at length at Montrouge and the barrier. It was open—abandoned—not a sentry, not a douanier visible.

“Where will Monsieur be pleased to descend?” my driver inquired, and added, with an effort of memory, that he had a wife and two adorable children on a top floor in the Rue du Mont Parnasse, and stabled his mare handy by. I paid and watched him from the deserted pavement as he drove away. A small child came running from a doorway behind me, and blundered against my legs. I caught him by the collar and demanded what had happened to Paris. “That I do not know,” said the child, “but mamma is dressing herself to take me to the review. Tenez!” he pointed, and at the head of the long street I saw advancing the front rank of a blue-coated regiment of Prussians, marching across Paris to take up position on the Orleans road.

That was my answer. Paris had surrendered! And I had entered it from the south just in time, if I wished, to witness the entry of His Majesty the Emperor Alexander from the north. Soon I found myself one of a crowd converging towards the bridges, to scatter northward along the line of His Majesty’s progress, from the Barrière de Pantin to the Champs Élysées, where the grand review was to be held. I chose this for my objective, and, making my way along the Quays, found myself shortly before ten o’clock in the Place de la Concorde, where a singular little scene brought me to a halt.

About a score of young men—aristocrats by their dress and carriage—were gathered about the centre of the square. Each wore a white scarf and the Bourbon cockade in his hat; and their leader, a weedy youth with hay-coloured hair, had drawn a paper from his pocket and was declaiming its contents at the top of a voice by several sizes too big for him:—

et cetera. Later on, I possessed myself of a copy of the Prince of Schwartzenberg’s proclamation, and identified the wooden rhetoric at once.

“Parisians! you have the example of Bordeaux before you”.... Ay, by the Lord, they had—right under their eyes! The hay-coloured youth wound up his reading with a “Vive le Roi!” and his band of walking gentlemen took up the shout. The crowd looked on impassive; one or two edged away; and a grey-haired, soldierly horseman (whom I recognised for the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin) passing in full tenue of Colonel of the National Guard, reined up, and addressed the young men in a few words of grave rebuke. Two or three answered by snapping their fingers, and repeating their “Vive le Roi” with a kind of embarrassed defiance. But their performance, before so chilling an audience, was falling sadly flat when a dozen or more of young royalist bloods came riding up to reanimate it—among them, M. Louis de Chateaubriand, M. Talleyrand’s brother, Archambaut de Périgord, the scoundrelly Marquis de Maubreuil—yes, and my cousin, the Vicomte de Saint-Yves!

The indecency, the cynical and naked impudence of it, took me like a buffet. There, in a group of strangers, my cheek reddened under it, and for the moment I had a mind to run. I had done better to run. By a chance his eye missed mine as he swaggered past at a canter, for all the world like a tenore robusto on horseback, with the rouge on his face, and his air of expansive Olympian black-guardism. He carried a lace white handkerchief at the end of his riding switch, and this was bad enough. But as he wheeled his bay thoroughbred, I saw that he had followed the déclassé Maubreuil’s example and decorated the brute’s tail with a Cross of the Legion of Honour. That brought my teeth together, and I stood my ground.

“Vive le Roi!” “Vivent les Bourbons!” “À bas le sabot corse!” Maubreuil had brought a basketful of white brassards and cockades, and the gallant horsemen began to ride about and press them upon the unresponsive crowd. Alain held one of the badges at arm’s length as he pushed into the little group about me, and our eyes met.

“Merci,” said I, “retenez-le jusqu’à ce que nous nous rencontrions—Rue Grégoire de Tours!”

His arm with the riding switch and laced handkerchief went up as though he had been stung. Before it could descend, I darted aside deep into the crowd which hustled around him, understanding nothing, but none the less sullenly hostile. “A bas les cocardes blanches!” cried one or two. “Who was the cur?” I heard Maubreuil’s question as he pressed in to the rescue, and Alain’s reply, “Peste! A young relative of mine who is in a hurry to lose his head; whereas I prefer to choose the time for that.”

I took this for a splutter of hatred, and even found it laughable as I made my escape good. At the same time, our encounter had put me out of humour for gaping at the review, and I turned back and recrossed the river, to seek the Rue du Fouarre and the Widow Jupille.

Now the Rue du Fouarre, though once a very famous thoroughfare, is to-day perhaps as squalid as any that drains its refuse by a single gutter into the Seine, and the widow had been no beauty even in the days when she followed the 106th of the Line as vivandière and before she wedded Sergeant Jupille of that regiment. But she and I had struck up a friendship over a flesh-wound which I received in an affair of outposts on the Algueda, and thenceforward I taught myself to soften the edge of her white wine by the remembered virtues of her ointment, so that when Sergeant Jupille was cut off by a grapeshot in front of Salamanca, and his Philomène retired to take charge of his mother’s wine shop in the Rue du Fouarre, she had enrolled my name high on the list of her prospective patrons. I felt myself, so to speak, a part of the goodwill of her house, and “Heaven knows,” thought I, as I threaded the insalubrious street, “it is something for a soldier of the Empire to count even on this much in Paris to-day. Est aliquid, quocunque loco, quocunque sacello....”

Madame Jupille knew me at once, and we fell (figuratively speaking) upon each other’s neck. Her shop was empty, the whole quarter had trooped off to the review. After mingling our tears (again figuratively) over the fickleness of the capital, I inquired if she had any letters for me.

“Why, no, comrade.”

“None?” I exclaimed with a very blank face.

“Not one”; Madame Jupille eyed me archly, and relented. “The reason being that Mademoiselle is too discreet.”

“Ah!” I heaved a big sigh of relief. “You provoking woman, tell me what you mean by that?”

“Well, now, it may have been ten days ago that a stranger called in and asked if I had any news of the corporal who praised my white wine. ‘Have I any news,’ said I, ‘of a needle in a bundle of hay? They all praise it.’” (O, Madame Jupille!)

“’The corporal I’m speaking of,’ said he, ‘is or was called Champdivers.’ ‘Was!’ I cried, ‘you are not going to tell me he is dead?’ and I declare to you, comrade, the tears came into my eyes. ‘No, he is not,’ said the stranger, ’and the best proof is that he will be here inquiring for letters before long. You are to tell him that if he expects one from’—see, I took the name down on a scrap of paper, and stuck it in a wine-glass here—’from Miss Flora Gilchrist, he will do well to wait in Paris until a friend finds means to deliver it by hand. And if he asks more about me, say that I am from’—tenez, I wrote the second name underneath—yes, that is it—’Mr. Romaine.’”

“Confound his caution!” said I. “What sort of man was this messenger?”

“O, a staid-looking man, dark and civil-spoken. You might call him an upper servant, or perhaps a notary’s clerk; very plainly dressed, in black.”

“He spoke French?”

“Parfaitement. What else?”

“And he has not called again?”

“To be sure, yes, and the day before yesterday, and seemed quite disappointed. ‘Is there anything Monsieur would like to add to his message?’ I asked. ‘No,’ said he, ’or stay, tell him that all goes well in the north, but he must not leave Paris until I see him.’”

You may guess how I cursed Mr. Romaine for this beating about the bush. If all went well in the north, what possible excuse of caution could the man have for holding back Flora’s letter? And how, in any case, could it compromise me here in Paris? I had half a mind to take the bit in my teeth and post off at once for Calais. Still, there was the plain injunction, and the lawyer doubtless had a reason for it hidden somewhere behind his tiresome circumambulatory approaches. And his messenger might be back at any hour.

Therefore, though it went against the grain, I thought it prudent to take lodgings with Madame Jupille and possess my soul in patience. You will say that it should not have been difficult to kill time in Paris between the 31st of March and the 5th of April 1814. The entry of the Allies, Marmont’s supreme betrayal, the Emperor’s abdication, the Cossacks in the streets, the newspaper offices at work like hives under their new editors, and buzzing contradictory news from morning to night; a new rumour at every cafe, a scuffle, or the makings of one, at every street corner, and hour by hour a steady stream of manifestoes, placards, handbills, caricatures, and broadsheets of opprobrious verse—the din of it all went by me like the vain noises of a dream as I trod the pavements, intent upon my own hopes and perplexities. I cannot think that this was mere selfishness; rather, a deep disgust was weaning me from my country. If this Paris indeed were the reality, then was I the phantasm, the revenant; then was France—the France for which I had fought and my parents gone to the scaffold—a land that had never been, and our patriotism the shadow of a shade. Judge me not too hardly if in the restless, aimless perambulations of those five days I crossed the bridge between the country that held neither kin nor friends for me, but only my ineffectual past, and the country wherein one human creature, if only one, had use for my devotion.

On the sixth day—that is, April 5th—my patience broke down. I took my resolution over lunch and a bottle of Beaujolais, and walked straight back from the restaurant to my lodgings, where I asked Madame Jupille for pen, ink, and paper, and sat down to advertise Mr. Romaine that, for good or ill, he might expect me in London within twenty-four hours of the receipt of this letter.

I had scarce composed the first sentence, when there came a knock at the door and Madame Jupille announced that two gentlemen desired to see me. “Show them up,” said I, laying down my pen with a leaping heart; and in the doorway a moment later stood—my cousin Alain!

He was alone. He glanced with a grin of comprehension from me to the letter, advanced, set his hat on the table beside it, and his gloves (after blowing into them) beside his hat.

“My cousin,” said he, “you show astonishing agility from time to time; but on the whole you are damned easy to hunt.”

I had risen. “I take it you have pressing business to speak of, since amid your latest political occupations you have been at pains to seek me out. If so, I will ask you to be brief.”

“No pains at all,” he corrected affably. “I have known all the time that you were here. In fact, I expected you some while before you arrived, and sent my man, Paul, with a message.”

“A message?”

“Certainly—touching a letter from la belle Flora. You received it? The message, I mean.”

“Then it was not——”

“No, decidedly it was not Mr. Romaine, to whom”—with another glance at the letter—“I perceive that you are writing for explanations. And since you are preparing to ask how on earth I traced you to this rather unsavoury den, permit me to inform you that a—b spells ‘ab,’ and that Bow Street, when on the track of a criminal, does not neglect to open his correspondence.”

I felt my hand tremble as it gripped the top rail of my chair, but I managed to command the voice to answer, coldly enough:

“One moment, Monsieur le Vicomte, before I do myself the pleasure of pitching you out of window. You have detained me these five days in Paris, and have done so, you give me to understand, by the simple expedient of a lie. So far, so good; will you do me the favour to complete the interesting self-exposure, and inform me of your reasons?”

“With all the pleasure in life. My plans were not ready, a little detail wanting, that is all. It is now supplied.” He took a chair, seated himself at the table, and drew a folded paper from his breast-pocket. “It will be news to you perhaps, that our uncle—our lamented uncle, if you choose—is dead these three weeks.”

“Rest his soul!”

“Forgive me if I stop short of that pious hope.” Alain hesitated, let his venom get the better of him, and spat out on his uncle’s memory an obscene curse which only betrayed the essential weakness of the man. Recovering himself, he went on: “I need not recall to you a certain scene (I confess too theatrical for my taste), arranged by the lawyer at his bedside; nor need I help you to an inkling of the contents of his last will. But possibly it may have slipped your memory that I gave Romaine fair warning. I promised him that I would raise the question of undue influence, and that I had my witnesses ready. I have added to them since; but I own to you that my case will be the stronger when you have obligingly signed the paper which I have the honour to submit to you.” And he tossed it, unopened, across the table.

I picked it up and unfolded it:—“I, the Viscount Anne de Kéroual de Saint-Yves, formerly serving under the name of Champdivers in the Buonapartist army, and later under that name a prisoner of war in the Castle of Edinburgh, hereby state that I had neither knowledge of my uncle the Count de Kéroual de Saint-Yves, nor expectations from him, nor was owned by him, until sought out by Mr. Daniel Romaine, in the Castle of Edinburgh, by him supplied with money to expedite my escape, and by him clandestinely smuggled at nightfall into Amersham Place; Further, that until that evening I had never set eyes on my uncle, nor have set eyes on him since; that he was bedridden when I saw him, and apparently in the last stage of senile decay. And I have reason to believe that Mr. Romaine did not fully inform him of the circumstances of my escape, and particularly of my concern in the death of a fellow-prisoner named Goguelat, formerly a maréchal des logis in the 22nd Regiment of the Line....”

Of the contents of this precious document let a sample suffice. From end to end it was a tissue of distorted statements implicated with dishonouring suggestions. I read it through, and let it drop on the table.

“I beg your pardon,” said I, “but what do you wish me to do with it?”

“Sign it,” said he.

I laughed. “Once more I beg your pardon, but though you have apparently dressed for it, this is not comic opera.”

“Nevertheless you will sign.”

“O, you weary me.” I seated myself, and flung a leg over the arm of my chair. “Shall we come to the alternative For I assume you have one.”

“The alternative, to be sure,” he answered cheerfully. “I have a companion below, one Clausel, and at the ‘Tête d’Or,’ a little way up the street, an escort of police.”

Here was a pleasing predicament. But if Alain had started with a chance of daunting me (which I do not admit), he had spoilt it long since by working on the raw of my temper. I kept a steady eye on him, and considered: and the longer I considered the better assured was I that his game must have a disastrously weak point somewhere, which it was my business to find.

“You have reminded me of your warning to Mr. Romaine. The subject is an ugly one for two of our family to touch upon; but do you happen to recall Mr. Romaine’s counter-threat?”

“Bluff! my young sir. It served his purpose for the moment, I grant you. I was unhinged. The indignity, the very monstrosity of it, the baselessness, staggered reason.”

“It was baseless, then?”

“The best proof is that in spite of his threat, and my open contempt and disregard of it, Mr. Romaine has not stirred a hand.”

“You mean that my uncle destroyed the evidence?”

“I mean nothing of the kind,” he retorted hotly, “for I deny that any such evidence at any time existed.”

I kept my eye on him. “Alain,” I said quietly, “you are a liar.”

A flush darkened his face beneath its cosmetics, and with an oath he dipped finger and thumb into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a dog whistle. “No more of that,” said he, “or I whistle up the police this minute.”

“Well, well, let us resume the discussion. You say this man Clausel has denounced me?”

He nodded.

“Soldiers of the Empire are cheap in Paris just now.”

“So cheap that public opinion would be content if all the messieurs Champdivers were to kill all the messieurs Goguelat and be shot or guillotined for it. I forget which your case demands, and doubt if public opinion would inquire.”

“And yet,” I mused, “there must be preliminaries; some form of trial, for instance, with witnesses. It is even possible that I might be found innocent.”

“I have allowed for that unlikely chance, and I look beyond it. To be frank, it does not strike me as probable that a British jury will hand over the estates of the Comte de Kéroual de Saint-Yves to an escaped Buonapartist prisoner who has stood his trial for the murder of a comrade, and received the benefit of the doubt.”

“Allow me,” said I, “to open the window an inch or two. No; put back your whistle. I do not propose to fling you out, at least not just yet; nor will I try to escape. To tell you the truth, you suggest the need of a little fresh air. And now, Monsieur, you assure me you hold the knave in your hand. Well then, play him. Before I tear your foolish paper up, let me have a look at your confederate.” I stepped to the door and called down the stairs, “Madame Jupille, be so good as to ask my other visitor to ascend.”

With that I turned to the window again and stood there looking out upon the foul gutter along which the refuse of some dye-works at the head of the street found its way down to the Seine. And standing so, I heard the expected footsteps mounting the stairs.

“I must ask your pardon, Monsieur, for this intrusion——”

“Hey!” If the words had been a charge of shot fired into my back, I could not have spun round on them more suddenly. “Mr. Romaine!”

For indeed it was he, and not Clausel, who stood in the doorway. And to this day I do not know if Alain or I stared at him with the blanker bewilderment; though I believe there was a significant difference in our complexions.

“M. le Vicomte,” said Romaine advancing, “recently effected an exchange. I have taken the liberty to effect another, and have left Mr. Clausel below listening to some arguments which are being addressed to him by Mr. Dudgeon, my confidential clerk. I think I may promise”—with a chuckle—“they will prove effectual. By your faces, gentlemen, I see that you regard my appearance as something in the nature of a miracle. Yet, M. le Vicomte at least should be guessing by this time that it is the simplest, most natural affair in the world. I engaged my word, sir, to have you watched. Will it be set down to more than ordinary astuteness that, finding you in negotiations for the exchange of the prisoner Clausel, we kept an eye upon him also?—that we followed him to Dover, and though unfortunate in missing the boat, reached Paris in time to watch the pair of you leave your lodgings this morning—nay, that knowing whither you were bound, we reached the Rue du Fouarre in time to watch you making your dispositions? But I run on too fast. Mr. Anne, I am entrusted with a letter for you. When, with Mr. Alain’s permission, you have read it, we will resume our little conversation.”

He handed me the letter and walked to the fireplace, where he took snuff copiously, while Alain eyed him like a mastiff about to spring. I broke open my letter and stooped to pick up a small enclosure which fell from it.

The enclosure was a note in a large and unformed hand, and ran—

Having read these letters through, I placed them in my breast-pocket, stepped to the table and handed Alain’s document gravely back to him; then turned to Mr. Romaine, who shut his snuff-box with a snap.

“It only remains, I think,” said the lawyer, “to discuss the terms which (merely as a matter of generosity, or say, for the credit of your house) can be granted to your—to Mr. Alain.”

“You forget Clausel, I think,” snarled my cousin.

“True, I had forgotten Clausel.” Mr. Romaine stepped to the head of the stairs and called down, “Dudgeon!”

Mr. Dudgeon appeared, and endeavoured to throw into the stiffness of his salutation a denial that he had ever waltzed with me in the moonlight.

“Where is the man Clausel?”

“I hardly know, sir, if you would place the wine-shop of the ‘Tête d’Or’ at the top or at the bottom of this street; I presume the top, since the sewer runs in the opposite direction. At all events Mr. Clausel disappeared about two minutes ago in the same direction as the sewer.”

Alain sprang up, whistle in hand.

“Put it down,” said Mr. Romaine. “The man was cheating you. I can only hope,” he added with a sour smile, “that you paid him on account with an I.O.U.”

But Alain turned at bay. “One trivial point seems to have escaped you, Master Attorney, or your courage is more than I gave you credit for. The English are none too popular in Paris as yet, and this is not the most scrupulous quarter. One blast of this whistle, a cry of ‘Espion Anglais!’ and two Englishmen——”

“Say three,” Mr. Romaine interrupted, and strode to the door. “Will Mr. Burchell Fenn be good enough to step upstairs?”

And here let me cry “Halt.” There are things in this world—or that is my belief—too pitiful to be set down in writing, and of these, Alain’s collapse was one. It may be, too, that Mr. Romaine’s British righteousness accorded rather ill with the weapon he used so unsparingly. Of Fenn I need only say, that the luscious rogue shouldered through the doorway as though he had a public duty to discharge, and only the contrariness of circumstances had prevented his discharging it before. He cringed to Mr. Romaine, who held him and the whole nexus of his villainies in the hollow of his hand. He was even obsequiously eager to denounce his fellow-traitor. Under a like compulsion, he would (I feel sure) have denounced his own mother. I saw the sturdy Dudgeon’s mouth working like a bull-terrier’s over a shrewmouse. And between them, Alain had never a chance. Not for the first time in this history, I found myself all but taking sides with him in sheer repulsion from the barbarity of the attack. It seemed that it was through Fenn that Mr. Romaine had first happened on the scent; and the greater rogue had held back a part of the evidence, and would trade it now—“having been led astray—to any gentleman that would let bygones be bygones.” And it was I, at length, who interposed when my cousin was beaten to his knees, and, having dismissed Mr. Burchell Fenn, restored the discussion to a businesslike footing. The end of it was, that Alain renounced all his claims, and accepted a yearly pension of six thousand francs. Mr. Romaine made it a condition that he should never set foot again in England; but seeing that he would certainly be arrested for debt within twenty-four hours of his landing at Dover, I thought this unnecessary.

“A good day’s work,” said the lawyer, as we stood together in the street outside.

But I was silent.

“And now, Mr. Anne, if I may have the honour of your company at dinner—shall we say Tortoni’s?—we will on our way step round to my hotel, the Quatre Saisons, behind the Hôtel de Ville, and order a calèche and four to be in readiness.”

CHAPTER XXXVI

I GO TO CLAIM FLORA

Behold me now speeding northwards on the wings of love, ballasted by Mr. Romaine. But, indeed, that worthy man climbed into the calèche with something less than his habitual gravity. He was obviously and pardonably flushed with triumph. I observed that now and again he smiled to himself in the twilight, or drew in his breath and emitted it with a martial pouf! And when he began to talk—which he did as soon as we were clear of the Saint-Denis barrier—the points of the family lawyer were untrussed. He leaned back in the calèche with the air of a man who had subscribed to the Peace of Europe, and dined well on top of it. He criticised the fortifications with a wave of his toothpick, and discoursed derisively and at large on the Emperor’s abdication, on the treachery of the Duke of Ragusa, on the prospects of the Bourbons, and on the character of M. Talleyrand, with anecdotes which made up in raciness for what they lacked in authenticity.

We were bowling through La Chapelle, when he pulled out his snuff-box and proffered it.

“You are silent, Mr. Anne.”

“I was waiting for the chorus,” said I. “’Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves: and Britons never, never, never——’ Come, out with it!”

“Well,” he retorted: “and I hope the tune will come natural to you before long.”

“O, give me time, my dear sir! I have seen the Cossacks enter Paris, and the Parisians decorate their poodles with the Cross of the Legion of Honour. I have seen them hoist a wretch on the Vendôme column, to smite the bronze face of the man of Austerlitz. I have seen the salle of the Opera rise to applaud a blatant fat fellow singing the praises of the Prussian—and to that tune of Vive Henri Quatre! I have seen, in my cousin Alain, of what the best blood in France is capable. Also, I have seen peasant boys—unripe crops of the later levies—mown down by grapeshot—raise themselves on their elbows to cheer for France and the little man in grey. In time, Mr. Romaine, no doubt my memory will confuse these lads with their betters, and their mothers with the ladies of the salle de l’Opéra: just as in time, no doubt, I shall find myself Justice of the Peace, and Deputy-Lieutenant of the shire of Buckingham. I am changing my country, as you remind me: and, on my faith, she has no place for me. But, for the sake of her, I have explored and found the best of her—in my new country’s prisons. And I repeat, you must give me time.”

“Tut, tut!” was his comment, as I searched for tinder box and sulphur match to relight my segar. “We must get you into Parliament, Mr. Anne. You have the gift.”

As we approached Saint-Denis, the flow of his discourse sensibly slackened: and, a little beyond, he pulled his travelling cap over his ears, and settled down to slumber. I sat wide awake beside him. The spring night had a touch of chill in it, and the breath of our horses, streaming back upon the lamps of the calèche, kept a constant nimbus between me and the postillions. Above it, and over the black spires of the poplar avenues, the regiments of stars moved in parade. My gaze went up to the ensign of their noiseless evolutions, to the pole-star, and to Cassiopeia swinging beneath it, low in the north, over my Flora’s pillow—my pole-star and journey’s end.

Under this soothing reflection I composed myself to slumber; and awoke, to my surprise and annoyance, in a miserable flutter of the nerves. And this fretfulness increased with the hours, so that from Amiens to the coast Mr. Romaine must have had the devil of a time with me. I bolted my meals at the way-houses, chafing all the while at the business of the relays. I popped up and down in the calèche like a shot on a hot shovel. I cursed our pace. I girded at the lawyer’s snuff-box, and could have called him out upon Calais sands, when we reached them, to justify his vile methodical use of it. By good fortune we arrived to find the packet ready with her warps, and bundled ourselves on board in a hurry. We sought separate cabins for the night, and in mine, as in a sort of moral bath, the drastic cross seas of the Channel cleansed me of my irritable humour, and left me like a rag, beaten and hung on a clothes-line to the winds of heaven.

In the grey of the morning we disembarked at Dover; and here Mr. Romaine had prepared a surprise for me. For, as we drew to the shore, and the throng of porters and waterside loafers, on what should my gaze alight but the beaming countenance of Mr. Rowley! I declare it communicated a roseate flush to the pallid cliffs of Albion. I could have fallen on his neck. On his side the honest lad kept touching his hat and grinning in a speechless ecstasy. As he confessed to me later, “It was either hold my tongue, sir, or call for three cheers.” He snatched my valise and ushered us through the crowd, to our hotel-breakfast. And, it seemed, he must have filled up his time at Dover with trumpetings of our importance: for the landlord welcomed us on the perron, obsequiously cringing; we entered in a respectful hush that might have flattered his Grace of Wellington himself; and the waiters, I believe, would have gone on all-fours, but for the difficulty of reconciling that posture with efficient service. I knew myself at last for a Personage: a great English land-owner: and did my best to command the mien proper to that tremendous class when, the meal despatched, we passed out between the bowing ranks to the door where our chaise stood ready.

“But hullo!” said I at sight of it; and my eye sought Rowley’s.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but I took it on myself to order the colour, and hoping it wasn’t a liberty.”

“Claret and invisible green—a duplicate, but for a bullet-hole wanting.”

“Which I didn’t like to go so far on my own hook, Mr. Anne.”

“We fight under the old colours, my lad.”

“And walk in and win this time, sir, strike me lucky!”

While we bowled along the first stage towards London—Mr. Romaine and I within the chaise and Rowley perched upon the dickey—I told the lawyer of our progress from Aylesbury to Kirkby-Lonsdale. He took snuff.

“Forsitan et hæc olim—that Rowley of yours seems a good-hearted lad, and less of a fool than he looks. The next time I have to travel post with an impatient lover, I’ll take a leaf out of his book and buy me a flageolet.”

“Sir, it was ungrateful of me——”

“Tut, tut, Mr. Anne. I was fresh from my little triumph, that is all; and perhaps would have felt the better for a word of approbation—a little pat on the back, as I may say. It is not often that I have felt the need of it—twice or thrice in my life, perhaps: not often enough to justify my anticipating your example and seeking a wife betimes; for that is a man’s one chance if he wants another to taste his success.”

“And yet I dare swear you rejoice in mine unselfishly enough.”

“Why, no, sir: your cousin would have sent me to the right-about within a week of his succession. Still, I own to you that he offended something at least as deep as self-interest: the sight and scent of him habitually turned my gorge: whereas”—and he inclined to me with a dry smile—“your unwisdom at least was amiable, and—in short, sir, though you can be infernally provoking, it has been a pleasure to serve you.”

You may be sure that this did not lessen my contrition. We reached London late that night; and here Mr. Romaine took leave of us. Business waited for him at Amersham Place. After a few hours’ sleep, Rowley woke me to choose between two post-boys in blue jackets and white hats, and two in buff jackets and black hats, who were competing for the honour of conveying us as far as Barnet: and having decided in favour of the blue and white, and solaced the buff and black with a pourboire, we pushed forward once more.

We were now upon the Great North Road, along which the York mail rolled its steady ten miles an hour to the wafted music of the guard’s bugle; a rate of speed which to the more Dorian mood of Mr. Rowley’s flageolet, I proposed to better by one-fifth. But first, having restored the lad to his old seat beside me, I must cross-question him upon his adventures in Edinburgh, and the latest news of Flora and her aunt, Mr. Robbie, Mrs. McRankine, and the rest of my friends. It came out that Mr. Rowley’s surrender to my dear girl had been both instantaneous and complete. “She is a floorer, Mr. Anne. I suppose now, sir, you’ll be standing up for that knock-me-down kind of thing?”

“Explain yourself, my lad.”

“Beg your pardon, sir, what they call love at first sight.” He wore an ingenuous blush and an expression at once shy and insinuating.

“The poets, Rowley, are on my side.”

“Mrs. McRankine, sir——”

“The Queen of Navarre, Mr. Rowley——”

But he so far forgot himself as to interrupt. “It took Mrs. McRankine years, sir, to get used to her first husband. She told me so.”

“It took us some days, if I remember, to get used to Mrs. McRankine. To be sure, her cooking——”

“That’s what I say, Mr. Anne: it’s more than skin-deep: and you’ll hardly believe me, sir—that is, if you didn’t take note of it—but she hev got an ankle.”

He had produced the pieces of his flageolet, and was adjusting them nervously, with a face red as a turkey-cock’s wattles. I regarded him with a new and incredulous amusement. That I served Mr. Rowley for a glass of fashion and a mould of form was of course no new discovery: and the traditions of body-service allow—nay, enjoin—that when the gentleman goes a-wooing, the valet shall take a sympathetic wound. What could be more natural than that a gentleman of sixteen should select a lady of fifty for his first essay in the tender passion? Still—Bethiah McRankine!

I kept my countenance with an effort. “Mr. Rowley,” said I, “if music be the food of love, play on.” And Mr. Rowley gave “The Girl I left behind me,” shyly at first, but anon with terrific expression. He broke off with a sigh. “Heigho!” in fact, said Rowley: and started off again while I tapped out the time, and hummed—

Thenceforward that not uninspiriting air became the motif of our progress. We never tired of it. Whenever our conversation flagged, by tacit consent Mr. Rowley pieced his flageolet together and started it. The horses lilted it out in their gallop: the harness jingled, the postillions tittuped to it. And the presto with which it wound up as we came to a post-house and a fresh relay of horses had to be heard to be believed.

So with the chaise windows open to the vigorous airs of spring, and my own breast like a window flung wide to youth and health and happy expectations, I rattled homewards; impatient as a lover should be, yet not too impatient to taste the humour of spinning like a lord, with a pocketful of money, along the road which the ci-devant M. Champdivers had so fearfully dodged and skirted in Burchell Fenn’s covered cart.

And yet so impatient that when we galloped over the Calton Hill and down into Edinburgh by the new London road, with the wind in our faces, and a sense of April in it, brisk and jolly, I must pack off Rowley to our lodgings with the valises, and stay only for a wash and breakfast at Dumbreck’s before posting on to Swanston alone.

When the gables of the cottage rose into view over the hill’s shoulder I dismissed my driver and walked forward, whistling the tune; but fell silent as I came under the lee of the garden wall, and sought for the exact spot of my old escalade. I found it by the wide beechen branches over the road, and hoisted myself noiselessly up to the coping where, as before, they screened me—or would have screened me had I cared to wait.

But I did not care to wait; and why? Because, not fifteen yards from me, she stood!—she, my Flora, my goddess, bareheaded, swept by chequers of morning sunshine and green shadows, with the dew on her sandal shoes and the lap of her morning gown appropriately heaped with flowers—with tulips, scarlet, yellow, and striped. And confronting her, with his back towards me and a remembered patch between the armholes of his stable-waistcoat, Robie the gardener rested both hands on his spade and expostulated.

“But I like to pick my tulips, leaves and all, Robie!”

“Aweel, miss; it’s clean ruinin’ the bulbs, that’s all I say to you.”

And that was all I waited to hear. As he bent over and resumed his digging I shook a branch of the beech with both hands and set it swaying. She heard the rustle and glanced up, and, spying me, uttered a gasping little cry.

“What ails ye, miss?” Robie straightened himself instanter; but she had whipped right-about face and was gazing towards the kitchen garden—

“Isn’t that a child among the arti—the strawberry beds, I mean?”

He cast down his spade and ran. She turned, let the tulips fall at her feet, and, ah! her second cry of gladness, and her heavenly blush as she stretched out both arms to me! It was all happening over again—with the difference that now my arms too were stretched out.

Robie had run a dozen yards perhaps, when either the noise I made in scrambling off the wall, or some recollection of having been served in this way before, brought him to a halt. At any rate, he turned round, and just in time to witness our embrace.

“The good Lord behear!” he exclaimed, stood stock-still for a moment, and waddled off at top speed towards the back door.

“We must tell Aunt at once! She will—why, Anne, where are you going?” She caught my sleeve.

“To the hen-house, to be sure,” said I.

A moment later, with peals of happy laughter, we had taken hands and were running along the garden alleys towards the house. And I remember, as we ran, finding it somewhat singular that this should be the first time I had ever invaded Swanston Cottage by way of the front door.

We came upon Miss Gilchrist in the breakfast room. A pile of linen lay on the horse-hair sofa; and the good lady, with a measuring tape in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other, was walking around Ronald, who stood on the hearthrug in a very manly attitude. She regarded me over her gold-rimmed spectacles, and, shifting the scissors into her left hand, held out her right.

“H’m,” said she; “I give ye good morning, Mosha. And what might you be wanting of us this time?”

“Madam,” I answered, “that, I hope, is fairly evident.”

Ronald came forward. “I congratulate you, St. Ives, with all my heart. And you may congratulate me: I have my commission.”

“Nay, then,” said I, “let me rather congratulate France that the war is over. Seriously, my dear fellow, I wish you joy. What’s the regiment?”

“The 4-th.”

“Chevenix’s!”

“Chevenix is a decent fellow. He has behaved very well, indeed he has.”

“Very well indeed,” said Flora, nodding her head.

“He has the knack. But if you expect me to like him any the better for it——”

“Major Chevenix,” put in Miss Gilchrist in her most Rhadamanthine voice, “always sets me in mind of a pair of scissors.” She opened and shut the pair in her hand, and I had to confess that the stiff and sawing action was admirably illustrative. “But I wish to heaven, madam,” thought I, “you could have chosen another simile!”

In the evening of that beatific day I walked back to Edinburgh by some aërial and rose-clouded path not indicated on the maps. It led somehow to my lodgings, and my feet touched earth when the door was opened to me by Bethiah McRankine.

“But where is Rowley?” I asked a moment later, looking round my sitting-room.

Mrs. McRankine smiled sardonically. “Him? He came back rolling his eyes so that I guessed him to be troubled in the wind. And he’s in bed this hour past with a spoonful of peppermint in his little wame.”

.......

And here I may ring down the curtain upon the adventures of Anne de Saint-Yves.

Flora and I were married early in June, and had been settled for little over six months, amid the splendours of Amersham Place, when news came of the Emperor’s escape from Elba. Throughout the consequent alarums and excursions of the Hundred Days (as M. de Chambord named them for us), I have to confess that the Vicomte Anne sat still and warmed his hands at the domestic hearth. To be sure, Napoleon had been my master, and I had no love for the cocarde blanche. But here was I, an Englishman, already, in legal but inaccurate phrase, a “naturalised” one, having, as Mr. Romaine put it, a stake in the country, not to speak of a nascent interest in its game-laws and the local administration of justice. In short, here was a situation to tickle a casuist. It did not, I may say, tickle me in the least, but played the mischief with my peace. If you, my friends, having weighed the pro and contra, would have counselled inaction, possibly, allowing for the hébétude de foyer and the fact that Flora was soon to become a mother, you might have predicted it. At any rate I sat still and read the newspapers: and on the top of them came a letter from Ronald, announcing that the 4-th had their marching, or rather their sailing, orders, and that within a week his boat would rock by the pier of Leith to convey him and his comrades to join the Duke of Wellington’s forces in the Low Countries. Forthwith nothing would suit my dear girl but we must post to Edinburgh to bid him farewell—in a chariot, this time, with a box seat for her maid and Mr. Rowley. We reached Swanston in time for Ronald to spend the eve of his departure with us at the Cottage; and very gallant the boy looked in his scarlet uniform, which he wore for the ladies’ benefit, and which (God forgive us men!) they properly bedewed with their tears.

Early next morning we drove over to the city and drew up in the thick of the crowd gathered at the foot of the Castle Hill to see the 4-th march out. We had waited half an hour, perhaps, when we heard two thumps of a drum and the first notes of the regimental quick-step sounded within the walls; the sentry at the outer gate stepped back and presented arms, and the ponderous archway grew bright with the red coats and brazen instruments of the band. The farewells on their side had been said; and the inexorable tramp—tramp upon the drawbridge was the burthen of their answer to the waving handkerchiefs, the huzzas of the citizens, the cries of the women. On they came, and in the first rank, behind the band, rose Major Chevenix. He saw us, flushed a little, and gravely saluted. I never liked the man; but will admit he made a fine figure there. And I pitied him a little; for while his eyes rested on Flora, hers wandered to the rear of the third company, where Ensign Ronald Gilchrist marched beside the tattered colours with chin held up and a high colour on his young cheeks and a lip that quivered as he passed us.

“God bless you, Ronald!”

“Left wheel!” The band and the Major riding behind it swung round the corner into North Bridge Street; the rear-rank and the adjutant behind it passed down the Lawnmarket. Our driver was touching up his horses to follow, when Flora’s hand stole into mine. And I turned from my own conflicting thoughts to comfort her.

END OF VOL. XX