ST. IVES GETS A BUNDLE OF BANK-NOTES
I was surprised one morning, shortly after, to find myself the object of
marked consideration by a civilian and a stranger. This was a man of the
middle age; he had a face of a mulberry colour, round black eyes,
comical tufted eyebrows, and a protuberant forehead, and was dressed in
clothes of a Quakerish cut. In spite of his plainness, he had that
inscrutable air of a man well-to-do in his affairs. I conceived he had
been some while observing me from a distance, for a sparrow sat betwixt
us quite unalarmed on the breech of a piece of cannon. So soon as our
eyes met, he drew near and addressed me in the French language, which he
spoke with a good fluency but an abominable accent.
"I have the pleasure of addressing Monsieur le Vicomte Anne de Keroual
de Saint-Yves?" said he.
"Well," said I, "I do not call myself all that; but I have a right to,
if I choose. In the meanwhile I call myself plain Champdivers, at your
disposal. It was my mother's name, and good to go soldiering with."
"I think not quite," said he; "for if I remember rightly your mother
also had the particle. Her name was Florimonde de Champdivers."
"Right again," said I, "and I am extremely pleased to meet a gentleman
so well informed in my quarterings. Is monsieur Born himself?" This I
said with a great air of assumption, partly to conceal the degree of
curiosity with which my visitor had inspired me, and in part because it
struck me as highly incongruous and comical in my prison garb and on the
lips of a private soldier.
He seemed to think so too, for he laughed.
"No, sir," he returned, speaking this time in English; "I am not
'_born_,' as you call it, and must content myself with _dying_, of which
I am equally susceptible with the best of you. My name is Mr.
Romaine--Daniel Romaine--a solicitor of London city, at your service;
and, what will perhaps interest you more, I am here at the request of
your great-uncle, the Count."
"What!" I cried, "does M. de Keroual de Saint-Yves remember the
existence of such a person as myself, and will he deign to count kinship
with a soldier of Napoleon?"
"You speak English well," observed my visitor.
"It has been a second language to me from a child," said I. "I had an
English nurse; my father spoke English with me; and I was finished by a
countryman of yours and a dear friend of mine, a Mr. Vicary."
A strong expression of interest came into the lawyer's face.
"What!" he cried, "you knew poor Vicary?"
"For more than a year," said I; "and shared his hiding-place for many
months."
"And I was his clerk, and have succeeded him in business," said he.
"Excellent man! It was on the affairs of M. de Keroual that he went to
that accursed country, from which he was never destined to return. Do
you chance to know his end, sir?"
"I am sorry," said I, "I do. He perished miserably at the hands of a
gang of banditti, such as we call _chauffeurs_. In a word, he was
tortured, and died of it. See," I added, kicking off one shoe, for I had
no stockings; "I was no more than a child, and see how they had begun to
treat myself."
He looked at the mark of my old burn with a certain shrinking. "Beastly
people!" I heard him mutter to himself.
"The English may say so with a good grace," I observed politely.
Such speeches were the coin in which I paid my way among this credulous
race. Ninety per cent. of our visitors would have accepted the remark as
natural in itself and creditable to my powers of judgment, but it
appeared my lawyer was more acute.
"You are not entirely a fool, I perceive," said he.
"No," said I; "not wholly."
"And yet it is well to beware of the ironical mood," he continued. "It
is a dangerous instrument. Your great uncle has, I believe, practised it
very much, until it is now become a problem what he means."
"And that brings me back to what you will admit is a most natural
inquiry," said I. "To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit? how did
you recognise me? and how did you know I was here?"
Carefully separating his coat skirts, the lawyer took a seat beside me
on the edge of the flags.
"It is rather an odd story," says he, "and, with your leave, I'll answer
the second question first. It was from a certain resemblance you bear to
your cousin, M. le Vicomte."
"I trust, sir, that I resemble him advantageously," said I.
"I hasten to reassure you," was the reply: "you do. To my eyes, M. Alain
de Saint-Yves has scarce a pleasing exterior. And yet, when I knew you
were here, and was actually looking for you--why, the likeness helped.
As for how I came to know your whereabouts, by an odd enough chance, it
is again M. Alain we have to thank. I should tell you, he has for some
time made it his business to keep M. de Keroual informed of your career;
with what purpose I leave you to judge. When he first brought the news
of your--that you were serving Buonaparte, it seemed it might be the
death of the old gentleman, so hot was his resentment. But from one
thing to another, matters have a little changed. Or I should rather say,
not a little. We learned you were under orders for the Peninsula, to
fight the English; then that you had been commissioned for a piece of
bravery, and were again reduced to the ranks. And from one thing to
another (as I say), M. de Keroual became used to the idea that you were
his kinsman and yet served with Buonaparte, and filled instead with
wonder that he should have another kinsman who was so remarkably well
informed of events in France. And now it became a very disagreeable
question, whether the young gentleman was not a spy? In short, sir, in
seeking to disserve you, he had accumulated against himself a load of
suspicions."
My visitor now paused, took snuff, and looked at me with an air of
benevolence.
"Good God, sir!" says I, "this is a curious story."
"You will say so before I have done," said he. "For there have two
events followed. The first of these was an encounter of M. de Keroual
and M. de Mauseant."
"I know the man to my cost," said I; "it was through him I lost my
commission."
"Do you tell me so?" he cried. "Why, here is news!"
"O, I cannot complain!" said I. "I was in the wrong. I did it with my
eyes open. If a man gets a prisoner to guard and lets him go, the least
he can expect is to be degraded."
"You will be paid for it," said he. "You did well for yourself and
better for your king."
"If I had thought I was injuring my emperor," said I, "I would have let
M. de Mauseant burn in hell ere I had helped him, and be sure of that! I
saw in him only a private person in a difficulty: I let him go in
private charity; not even to profit myself will I suffer it to be
misunderstood."
"Well, well," said the lawyer, "no matter now. This is a foolish
warmth--a very misplaced enthusiasm, believe me! The point of the story
is that M. de Mauseant spoke of you with gratitude, and drew your
character in such a manner as greatly to affect your uncle's views. Hard
upon the back of which, in came your humble servant, and laid before him
the direct proof of what we had been so long suspecting. There was no
dubiety permitted. M. Alain's expensive way of life, his clothes and
mistresses, his dicing and racehorses, were all explained: he was in
the pay of Buonaparte, a hired spy, and a man that held the strings of
what I can only call a convolution of extremely fishy enterprises. To do
M. de Keroual justice, he took it in the best way imaginable, destroyed
the evidences of the one great-nephew's disgrace--and transferred his
interest wholly to the other."
"What am I to understand by that?" said I.
"I will tell you," says he. "There is a remarkable inconsistency in
human nature which gentlemen of my cloth have a great deal of occasion
to observe. Selfish persons can live without chick or child, they can
live without all mankind except perhaps the barber and the apothecary;
but when it comes to dying, they seem physically unable to die without
an heir. You can apply this principle for yourself. Viscount Alain,
though he scarce guesses it, is no longer in the field. Remains,
Viscount Anne."
"I see," said I, "you give a very unfavourable impression of my uncle,
the Count."
"I had not meant it," said he. "He has led a loose life--sadly
loose--but he is a man it is impossible to know and not to admire; his
courtesy is exquisite."
"And so you think there is actually a chance for me?" I asked.
"Understand," said he: "in saying as much as I have done, I travel quite
beyond my brief. I have been clothed with no capacity to talk of wills,
or heritages, or your cousin. I was sent here to make but the one
communication: that M. de Keroual desires to meet his great-nephew."
"Well," said I, looking about me on the battlements by which we sat
surrounded, "this is a case in which Mahomet must certainly come to the
mountain."
"Pardon me," said Mr. Romaine; "you know already your uncle is an aged
man; but I have not yet told you that he is quite broken up, and his
death shortly looked for. No, no, there is no doubt about it--it is the
mountain that must come to Mahomet."
"From an Englishman, the remark is certainly significant," said I; "but
you are of course, and by trade, a keeper of men's secrets, and I see
you keep that of Cousin Alain, which is not the mark of a truculent
patriotism, to say the least."
"I am first of all the lawyer of your family!" says he.
"That being so," said I, "I can perhaps stretch a point myself. This
rock is very high, and it is very steep; a man might come by a devil of
a fall from almost any part of it, and yet I believe I have a pair of
wings that might carry me just so far as to the bottom. Once at the
bottom I am helpless."
"And perhaps it is just then that I could step in," returned the lawyer.
"Suppose by some contingency, at which I make no guess, and on which I
offer no opinion----"
But here I interrupted him. "One word ere you go further. I am under no
parole," said I.
"I understood so much," he replied, "although some of you French gentry
find their word sit lightly on them."
"Sir, I am not one of those," said I.
"To do you plain justice, I do not think you one," said he. "Suppose
yourself, then, set free and at the bottom of the rock," he continued,
"although I may not be able to do much, I believe I can do something to
help you on your road. In the first place I would carry this, whether in
an inside pocket or in my shoe." And he passed me a bundle of
bank-notes.
"No harm in that," said I, at once concealing them.
"In the second place," he resumed, "it is a great way from here to where
your uncle lives--Amersham Place, not far from Dunstable; you have a
great part of Britain to get through; and for the first stages, I must
leave you to your own luck and ingenuity. I have no acquaintance here in
Scotland, or at least" (with a grimace) "no dishonest ones. But further
to the south, about Wakefield, I am told there is a gentleman called
Burchell Fenn, who is not so particular as some others, and might be
willing to give you a cast forward. In fact, sir, I believe it's the
man's trade: a piece of knowledge that burns my mouth. But that is what
you get by meddling with rogues; and perhaps the biggest rogue now
extant, M. de Saint-Yves, is your cousin, M. Alain."
"If this be a man of my cousin's," I observed, "I am perhaps better to
keep clear of him?"
"It was through some paper of your cousin's that we came across his
trail," replied the lawyer. "But I am inclined to think, so far as
anything is safe in such a nasty business, you might apply to the man
Fenn. You might even, I think, use the Viscount's name; and the little
trick of family resemblance might come in. How, for instance, if you
were to call yourself his brother?"
"It might be done," said I. "But look here a moment. You propose to me a
very difficult game: I have apparently a devil of an opponent in my
cousin; and, being a prisoner of war, I can scarcely be said to hold
good cards. For what stakes, then, am I playing?"
"They are very large," said he. "Your great-uncle is immensely
rich--immensely rich. He was wise in time; he smelt the Revolution long
before; sold all that he could, and had all that was movable transported
to England through my firm. There are considerable estates in England;
Amersham Place itself is very fine; and he has much money, wisely
invested. He lives, indeed, like a prince. And of what use is it to him?
He has lost all that was worth living for--his family, his country; he
has seen his king and queen murdered; he has seen all these miseries and
infamies," pursued the lawyer, with a rising inflection and a
heightening colour; and then broke suddenly off,--"In short, sir, he has
seen all the advantages of that government for which his nephew carries
arms, and he has the misfortune not to like them."
"You speak with a bitterness that I suppose I must excuse," said I; "yet
which of us has the more reason to be bitter? This man, my uncle, M. de
Keroual, fled. My parents, who were less wise perhaps, remained. In the
beginning they were even republicans; to the end they could not be
persuaded to despair of the people. It was a glorious folly, for which,
as a son, I reverence them. First one and then the other perished. If I
have any mark of a gentleman, all who taught me died upon the scaffold,
and my last school of manners was the prison of the Abbaye. Do you think
you can teach bitterness to a man with a history like mine?"
"I have no wish to try," said he. "And yet there is one point I cannot
understand: I cannot understand that one of your blood and experience
should serve the Corsican. I cannot understand it: it seems as though
everything generous in you must rise against that--domination."
"And perhaps," I retorted, "had your childhood passed among wolves, you
would have been overjoyed yourself to see the Corsican Shepherd."
"Well, well," replied Mr. Romaine, "it may be. There are things that do
not bear discussion."
And with a wave of his hand he disappeared abruptly down a flight of
steps and under the shadow of a ponderous arch.