Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (413 page)
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Authors: ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
‘I am pleased, madam, to welcome you to my poor house,’ he said; ‘and shall be still more so, if what were else a barren courtesy and a pleasure personal to myself, shall prove to be of serious benefit to you and Mr. Desborough.’
‘Your Highness,’ replied Clara, ‘I must begin with thanks; it is like what I have heard of you, that you should thus take up the case of the unfortunate; and as for my Harry, he is worthy of all that you can do.’ She paused.
‘But for yourself?’ suggested Mr. Godall — ’it was thus you were about to continue, I believe.’
‘You take the words out of my mouth,’ she said. ‘For myself, it is different.’
‘I am not here to be a judge of men,’ replied the Prince; ‘still less of women. I am now a private person like yourself and many million others; but I am one who still fights upon the side of quiet. Now, madam, you know better than I, and God better than you, what you have done to mankind in the past; I pause not to inquire; it is with the future I concern myself, it is for the future I demand security. I would not willingly put arms into the hands of a disloyal combatant; and I dare not restore to wealth one of the levyers of a private and a barbarous war. I speak with some severity, and yet I pick my terms. I tell myself continually that you are a woman; and a voice continually reminds me of the children whose lives and limbs you have endangered. A woman,’ he repeated solemnly — ’and children. Possibly, madam, when you are yourself a mother, you will feel the bite of that antithesis: possibly when you kneel at night beside a cradle, a fear will fall upon you, heavier than any shame; and when your child lies in the pain and danger of disease, you shall hesitate to kneel before your Maker.’
‘You look at the fault,’ she said, ‘and not at the excuse. Has your own heart never leaped within you at some story of oppression? But, alas, no! for you were born upon a throne.’
‘I was born of woman,’ said the Prince; ‘I came forth from my mother’s agony, helpless as a wren, like other nurselings. This, which you forgot, I have still faithfully remembered. Is it not one of your English poets, that looked abroad upon the earth and saw vast circumvallations, innumerable troops manoeuvring, warships at sea and a great dust of battles on shore; and casting anxiously about for what should be the cause of so many and painful preparations, spied at last, in the centre of all, a mother and her babe? These, madam, are my politics; and the verses, which are by Mr. Coventry Patmore, I have caused to be translated into the Bohemian tongue. Yes, these are my politics: to change what we can, to better what we can; but still to bear in mind that man is but a devil weakly fettered by some generous beliefs and impositions, and for no word however nobly sounding, and no cause however just and pious, to relax the stricture of these bonds.’
There was a silence of a moment.
‘I fear, madam,’ resumed the Prince, ‘that I but weary you. My views are formal like myself; and like myself, they also begin to grow old. But I must still trouble you for some reply.’
‘I can say but one thing,’ said Mrs. Desborough: ‘I love my husband.’
‘It is a good answer,’ returned the Prince; ‘and you name a good influence, but one that need not be conterminous with life.’
‘I will not play at pride with such a man as you,’ she answered. ‘What do you ask of me? not protestations, I am sure. What shall I say? I have done much that I cannot defend and that I would not do again. Can I say more? Yes: I can say this: I never abused myself with the muddle-headed fairy tales of politics. I was at least prepared to meet reprisals. While I was levying war myself — or levying murder, if you choose the plainer term — I never accused my adversaries of assassination. I never felt or feigned a righteous horror, when a price was put upon my life by those whom I attacked. I never called the policeman a hireling. I may have been a criminal, in short; but I never was a fool.’
‘Enough, madam,’ returned the Prince: ‘more than enough! Your words are most reviving to my spirits; for in this age, when even the assassin is a sentimentalist, there is no virtue greater in my eyes than intellectual clarity. Suffer me, then, to ask you to retire; for by the signal of that bell, I perceive my old friend, your mother, to be close at hand. With her I promise you to do my utmost.’
And as Mrs. Desborough returned to the Divan, the Prince, opening a door upon the other side, admitted Mrs. Luxmore.
‘Madam and my very good friend,’ said he, ‘is my face so much changed that you no longer recognise Prince Florizel in Mr. Godall?’
‘To be sure!’ she cried, looking at him through her glasses. ‘I have always regarded your Highness as a perfect man; and in your altered circumstances, of which I have already heard with deep regret, I will beg you to consider my respect increased instead of lessened.’
‘I have found it so,’ returned the Prince, ‘with every class of my acquaintance. But, madam, I pray you to be seated. My business is of a delicate order, and regards your daughter.’
‘In that case,’ said Mrs. Luxmore, ‘you may save yourself the trouble of speaking, for I have fully made up my mind to have nothing to do with her. I will not hear one word in her defence; but as I value nothing so particularly as the virtue of justice, I think it my duty to explain to you the grounds of my complaint. She deserted me, her natural protector; for years, she has consorted with the most disreputable persons; and to fill the cup of her offence, she has recently married. I refuse to see her, or the being to whom she has linked herself. One hundred and twenty pounds a year, I have always offered her: I offer it again. It is what I had myself when I was her age.’
‘Very well, madam,’ said the Prince; ‘and be that so! But to touch upon another matter: what was the income of the Reverend Bernard Fanshawe?’
‘My father?’ asked the spirited old lady. ‘I believe he had seven hundred pounds in the year.’
‘You were one, I think, of several?’ pursued the Prince.
‘Of four,’ was the reply. ‘We were four daughters; and painful as the admission is to make, a more detestable family could scarce be found in England.’
‘Dear me!’ said the Prince. ‘And you, madam, have an income of eight thousand?’
‘Not more than five,’ returned the old lady; ‘but where on earth are you conducting me?’
‘To an allowance of one thousand pounds a year,’ replied Florizel, smiling. ‘For I must not suffer you to take your father for a rule. He was poor, you are rich. He had many calls upon his poverty: there are none upon your wealth. And indeed, madam, if you will let me touch this matter with a needle, there is but one point in common to your two positions: that each had a daughter more remarkable for liveliness than duty.’
‘I have been entrapped into this house,’ said the old lady, getting to her feet. ‘But it shall not avail. Not all the tobacconists in Europe . . .’
‘Ah, madam,’ interrupted Florizel, ‘before what is referred to as my fall, you had not used such language! And since you so much object to the simple industry by which I live, let me give you a friendly hint. If you will not consent to support your daughter, I shall be constrained to place that lady behind my counter, where I doubt not she would prove a great attraction; and your son-in-law shall have a livery and run the errands. With such young blood my business might be doubled, and I might be bound in common gratitude to place the name of Luxmore beside that of Godall.’
‘Your Highness,’ said the old lady, ‘I have been very rude, and you are very cunning. I suppose the minx is on the premises. Produce her.’
‘Let us rather observe them unperceived,’ said the Prince; and so saying he rose and quietly drew back the curtain.
Mrs. Desborough sat with her back to them on a chair; Somerset and Harry were hanging on her words with extraordinary interest; Challoner, alleging some affair, had long ago withdrawn from the detested neighbourhood of the enchantress.
‘At that moment,’ Mrs. Desborough was saying, ‘Mr Gladstone detected the features of his cowardly assailant. A cry rose to his lips: a cry of mingled triumph . . .’
‘That is Mr. Somerset!’ interrupted the spirited old lady, in the highest note of her register. ‘Mr. Somerset, what have you done with my house-property?’
‘Madam,’ said the Prince, ‘let it be mine to give the explanation; and in the meanwhile, welcome your daughter.’
‘Well, Clara, how do you do?’ said Mrs. Luxmore. ‘It appears I am to give you an allowance. So much the better for you. As for Mr. Somerset, I am very ready to have an explanation; for the whole affair, though costly, was eminently humorous. And at any rate,’ she added, nodding to Paul, ‘he is a young gentleman for whom I have a great affection, and his pictures were the funniest I ever saw.’
‘I have ordered a collation,’ said the Prince. ‘Mr. Somerset, as these are all your friends, I propose, if you please, that you should join them at table. I will take the shop.’
THE MERRY MEN AND OTHER TALES AND FABLES
This collection of short stories was first published in 1893 and contains some of Stevenson’s last finished works before he died the following year.
The very rare first edition
CONTENTS
Dedication
My dear Lady Taylor
,
To your name
,
if I wrote on brass
,
I could add nothing
;
it has been already written higher than I could dream to reach
,
by a strong and dear hand
;
and if I now dedicate to you these tales
,
it is not as the writer who brings you his work
,
but as the friend who would remind you of his affection
.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
THE MERRY MEN
CHAPTER I. EILEAN AROS.
It was a beautiful morning in the late July when I set forth on foot for the last time for Aros. A boat had put me ashore the night before at Grisapol; I had such breakfast as the little inn afforded, and, leaving all my baggage till I had an occasion to come round for it by sea, struck right across the promontory with a cheerful heart.
I was far from being a native of these parts, springing, as I did, from an unmixed lowland stock. But an uncle of mine, Gordon Darnaway, after a poor, rough youth, and some years at sea, had married a young wife in the islands; Mary Maclean she was called, the last of her family; and when she died in giving birth to a daughter, Aros, the sea-girt farm, had remained in his possession. It brought him in nothing but the means of life, as I was well aware; but he was a man whom ill-fortune had pursued; he feared, cumbered as he was with the young child, to make a fresh adventure upon life; and remained in Aros, biting his nails at destiny. Years passed over his head in that isolation, and brought neither help nor contentment. Meantime our family was dying out in the lowlands; there is little luck for any of that race; and perhaps my father was the luckiest of all, for not only was he one of the last to die, but he left a son to his name and a little money to support it. I was a student of Edinburgh University, living well enough at my own charges, but without kith or kin; when some news of me found its way to Uncle Gordon on the Ross of Grisapol; and he, as he was a man who held blood thicker than water, wrote to me the day he heard of my existence, and taught me to count Aros as my home. Thus it was that I came to spend my vacations in that part of the country, so far from all society and comfort, between the codfish and the moorcocks; and thus it was that now, when I had done with my classes, I was returning thither with so light a heart that July day.
The Ross, as we call it, is a promontory neither wide nor high, but as rough as God made it to this day; the deep sea on either hand of it, full of rugged isles and reefs most perilous to seamen — all overlooked from the eastward by some very high cliffs and the great peals of Ben Kyaw.
The Mountain of the Mist
, they say the words signify in the Gaelic tongue; and it is well named. For that hill-top, which is more than three thousand feet in height, catches all the clouds that come blowing from the seaward; and, indeed, I used often to think that it must make them for itself; since when all heaven was clear to the sea level, there would ever be a streamer on Ben Kyaw. It brought water, too, and was mossy to the top in consequence. I have seen us sitting in broad sunshine on the Ross, and the rain falling black like crape upon the mountain. But the wetness of it made it often appear more beautiful to my eyes; for when the sun struck upon the hill sides, there were many wet rocks and watercourses that shone like jewels even as far as Aros, fifteen miles away.