WHEREIN THE PRIEST LEAVES ME, AND I MAKE AN INLAND VOYAGE
What this marvel betokened was altogether beyond my comprehension, but
the five men were no sooner gone than I clapped on my hat and drew up
the collar of my coat and ran like fury through the plashing streets for
the place that was our temporary home. It must have been an intuition of
the raised that guided me; my way was made without reflection on it,
at pure hazard, and yet I landed through a multitude of winding and
bewildering streets upon the Isle of the City and in front of the Hôtel
Dieu in a much shorter time than it had taken me to get from there to
the Duke of Burgundy's Head.
I banged past the doorkeeper, jumped upstairs to the clergyman's
quarters, threw open the door and--found Father Hamilton was gone!
About the matter there could be no manner of dubiety, for he had left a
letter directed to myself upon the drawers-head.
“My Good Paul (said the epistle, that I have kept till now as a memorial
of my adventure): When you return you will discover from this that I
have taken leave _a l'anglaise_, and I fancy I can see my secretary
looking like the arms of Bourges (though that is an unkind imputation).
'Tis fated, seemingly, that there shall be no rest for the sole of
the foot of poor Father Hamilton. I had no sooner got to like a loose
collar, and an unbuttoned vest, and the seclusion of a cell, than I must
be plucked out; and now when my birds--the darlings!--are on the very
point of hatching I must make adieux. _Oh! la belle équipée!_ M. Buhot
knows where I am--that's certain, so I must remove myself, and this time
I do not propose to burden M. Paul Greig with my company, for it will
be a miracle if they fail to find me. As for my dear Croque-mort, he can
have the glass coach and Jacques and Bernard, and doubtless the best
he can do with them is to take all to Dunkerque and leave them there.
I myself, I go _sans trompette_, and no inquiries will discover to him
where I go.”
As a postscript he added, “And 'twas only a sailor's log, dear lad! My
poor young Paul!” When I read the letter I was puzzled tremendously, and
at first I felt inclined to blame the priest for a scurvy flitting to
rid himself of my society, but a little deliberation convinced me that
no such ignoble consideration was at the bottom of his flight. If I read
his epistle aright the step he took was in my own interest, though how
it could be so there was no surmising. In any case he was gone; his
friend in the hospital told me he had set out behind myself, and taken
a candle with him and given a farewell visit to his birds, and almost
cried about them and about myself, and then departed for good to conceal
himself, in some other part of the city, probably, but exactly where
his friend had no way of guessing. And it was a further evidence of the
priest's good feeling to myself (if such were needed) that he had left a
sum of a hundred livres for me towards the costs of my future movements.
I left the Hôtel Dieu at midnight to wander very melancholy about the
streets for a time, and finally came out upon the river's bank, where
some small vessels hung at a wooden quay. I saw them in moonlight (for
now the rain was gone), and there rose in me such a feeling as I had
often experienced as a lad in another parish than the Mearns, to see the
road that led from strangeness past my mother's door. The river seemed a
pathway out of mystery and discontent to the open sea, and the open sea
was the same that beat about the shores of Britain, and my thought
took flight there and then to Britain, but stopped for a space, like a
wearied bird, upon the town Dunkerque. There is one who reads this
who will judge kindly, and pardon when I say that I felt a sort of
tenderness for the lady there, who was not only my one friend in France,
so far as I could guess, but, next to my mother, the only woman who knew
my shame and still retained regard for me. And thinking about Scotland
and about Dunkerque, and seeing that watery highway to them both, I was
seized with a great repugnance for the city I stood in, and felt that
I must take my feet from there at once. Father Hamilton was lost to me:
that was certain. I could no more have found him in this tanglement
of streets and strange faces than I could have found a needle in a
haystack, and I felt disinclined to make the trial. Nor was I prepared
to avail myself of his offer of the coach and horses, for to go
travelling again in them would be to court Bicêtre anew.
There was a group of busses or barges at the quay, as I have said, all
huddled together as it were animals seeking warmth, with their bows
nuzzling each other, and on one of them there were preparations being
made for her departure. A cargo of empty casks was piled up in her,
lights were being hung up at her bow and stern, and one of her crew was
ashore in the very act of casting off her ropes. At a flash it occurred
to me that I had here the safest and the speediest means of flight.
I ran at once to the edge of the quay and clumsily propounded a question
as to where the barge was bound for.
“Rouen or thereabouts,” said the master.
I asked if I could have a passage, and chinked my money in my pocket.
My French might have been but middling, but Lewis d'Or talks in a
language all can understand.
Ten minutes later we were in the fairway of the river running down
through the city which, in that last look I was ever fated to have of
it, seemed to brood on either hand of us like bordering hills, and at
morning we were at a place by name Triel.
Of all the rivers I have seen I must think the Seine the finest. It runs
in loops like my native Forth, sometimes in great, wide stretches that
have the semblance of moorland lochs. In that fine weather, with a sun
that was most genial, the country round about us basked and smiled.
We moved upon the fairest waters, by magic gardens, and the borders of
enchanted little towns. Now it would be a meadow sloping backward from
the bank, where reeds were nodding, to the horizon; now an orchard
standing upon grass that was the rarest green, then a village with rusty
roofs and spires and the continual chime of bells, with women washing
upon stones or men silent upon wherries fishing. Every link of the
river opened up a fresher wonder; if not some poplared isle that had
the invitation to a childish escapade, 'twould be another town, or the
garden of a château, maybe, with ladies walking stately on the lawns,
perhaps alone, perhaps with cavaliers about them as if they moved
in some odd woodland minuet. I can mind of songs that came from open
windows, sung in women's voices; of girls that stood drawing water and
smiled on us as we passed, at home in our craft of fortune, and still
the lucky roamers seeing the world so pleasantly without the trouble of
moving a step from our galley fire.
Sometimes in the middle of the days we would stop at a red-faced,
ancient inn, with bowers whose tables almost had their feet dipped in
the river, and there would eat a meal and linger on a pot of wine while
our barge fell asleep at her tether and dreamt of the open sea. About us
in these inns came the kind country-people and talked of trivial things
for the mere sake of talking, because the weather was sweet and God
so gracious; homely sounds would waft from the byres and from the
barns--the laugh of bairns, the whistle of boys, the low of cattle.
At night we moored wherever we might be, and once I mind of a place
called Andelys, selvedged with chalky cliffs and lorded over by a castle
called Gaillard, that had in every aspect of it something of the clash
of weapons and of trumpet-cry. The sky shone blue through its gaping
gables and its crumbling windows like so many eyes; the birds that
wheeled all round it seemed to taunt it for its inability. The old wars
over, the deep fosse silent, the strong men gone--and there at its foot
the thriving town so loud with sounds of peaceful trade! Whoever has
been young, and has the eye for what is beautiful and great and stately,
must have felt in such a scene that craving for companionship that
tickles like a laugh within the heart--that longing for some one to feel
with him, and understand, and look upon with silence. In my case 'twas
two women I would have there with me just to look upon this Gaillard and
the town below it.
Then the bending, gliding river again, the willow and the aspen
edges, the hazy orchards and the emerald swards; hamlets, towns,
farm-steadings, châteaux, kirks, and mills; the flying mallard, the
leaping perch, the silver dawns, the starry nights, the ripple of the
water in my dreams, and at last the city of Rouen. My ship of fortune
went no further on.
I slept a night in an inn upon the quay, and early the next morning,
having bought a pair of boots to save my red shoes, I took the road over
a hill that left Rouen and all its steeples, reeking at the bottom of a
bowl. I walked all day, through woods and meadows and trim small towns
and orchards, and late in the gloaming came upon the port of Havre de
Grace.
The sea was sounding there, and the smell of it was like a salutation. I
went out at night from my inn, and fairly joyed in its propinquity, and
was so keen on it that I was at the quay before it was well daylight.
The harbour was full of vessels. It was not long ere I got word of one
that was in trim for Dunkerque, to which I took a passage, and by favour
of congenial weather came upon the afternoon of the second day.
Dunkerque was more busy with soldiers than ever, all the arms of France
seemed to be collected there, and ships of war and flat-bottomed boats
innumerable were in the harbour.
At the first go-off I made for the lodgings I had parted from so
unceremoniously on the morning of that noisy glass coach.
The house, as I have said before, was over a baker's shop, and was
reached by a common outer stair that rose from a court-yard behind.
Though internally the domicile was well enough, indeed had a sort of
old-fashioned gentility, and was kept by a woman whose man had been a
colonel of dragoons, but now was a tippling pensioner upon the king, and
his own wife's labours, it was, externally, somewhat mean, the place a
solid merchant of our own country might inhabit, but scarce the place
wherein to look for royal blood. What was my astonishment, then, when,
as I climbed the stair, I came face to face with the Prince!
I felt the stair swing off below me and half distrusted my senses, but I
had the presence of mind to take my hat off.
“_Bon jour, Monsieur_, said he, with a slight hiccough, and I saw that
he was flushed and meant to pass with an evasion. There and then a
daft notion to explain myself and my relations with the priest who had
planned his assassination came to me, and I stopped and spoke.
“Your Royal Highness---” I began, and at that he grew purple.
“_Cest un drôle de corps!_” said he, and, always speaking in French,
said he again:
“You make an error, Monsieur; I have not the honour of Monsieur's
acquaintance,” and looked at me with a bold eye and a disconcerting.
“Greig,” I blurted, a perfect lout, and surely as blind as a mole that
never saw his desire, “I had the honour to meet your Royal Highness at
Versailles.”
“My Royal Highness!” said he, this time in English. “I think Monsieur
mistakes himself.” And then, when he saw how crestfallen I was,
he smiled and hiccoughed again. “You are going to call on our good
Clancarty,” said he. “In that case please tell him to translate to you
the proverb, _Oui phis sait plus se tait_.”
“There is no necessity, Monsieur,” I answered promptly. “Now that I look
closer I see I was mistaken. The person I did you the honour to take you
for was one in whose opinion (if he took the trouble to think of me at
all) I should have liked to re-establish myself, that was all.”
In spite of his dissipation there was something noble in his manner--a
style of the shoulders and the hands, a poise of the head that I might
practise for years and come no closer on than any nowt upon my father's
fields. It was that which I remember best of our engagement on the
stair, and that at the last of it he put out his hand to bid me
good-day.
“My name,” says he, “is Monsieur Albany so long as I am in Dunkerque.
_À bon entendeur salut!_ I hope we may meet again, Monsieur Greig.” He
looked down at the black boots I had bought me in Rouen. “If I might
take the liberty to suggest it,” said he, smiling, “I should abide by
the others. I have never seen their wearer wanting wit, _esprit_, and
prudence--which are qualities that at this moment I desire above all in
those that count themselves my friends.”
And with that he was gone. I watched him descend the remainder of the
stair with much deliberation, and did not move a step myself until the
tip of his scabbard had gone round the corner of the close.