Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (172 page)

‘This is a wild-goose chase,’ said he.

With the cessation of the footfalls, another sound smote upon their ears.

‘O, what’s that?’ cried Julia.

‘I can’t think,’ said Gideon.

The Squirradical had his stick presented like a sword. ‘Gid,’ he began, ‘Gid, I — ’

‘O Mr Forsyth!’ cried the girl. ‘O don’t go forward, you don’t know what it might be — it might be something perfectly horrid.’

‘It may be the devil itself,’ said Gideon, disengaging himself, ‘but I am going to see it.’

‘Don’t be rash, Gid,’ cried his uncle.

The barrister drew near to the sound, which was certainly of a portentous character. In quality it appeared to blend the strains of the cow, the fog-horn, and the mosquito; and the startling manner of its enunciation added incalculably to its terrors. A dark object, not unlike the human form divine, appeared on the brink of the ditch.

‘It’s a man,’ said Gideon, ‘it’s only a man; he seems to be asleep and snoring. Hullo,’ he added, a moment after, ‘there must be something wrong with him, he won’t waken.’

Gideon produced his vestas, struck one, and by its light recognized the tow head of Harker.

‘This is the man,’ said he, ‘as drunk as Belial. I see the whole story’; and to his two companions, who had now ventured to rejoin him, he set forth a theory of the divorce between the carrier and his cart, which was not unlike the truth.

‘Drunken brute!’ said Uncle Ned, ‘let’s get him to a pump and give him what he deserves.’

‘Not at all!’ said Gideon. ‘It is highly undesirable he should see us together; and really, do you know, I am very much obliged to him, for this is about the luckiest thing that could have possibly occurred. It seems to me — Uncle Ned, I declare to heaven it seems to me — I’m clear of it!’

‘Clear of what?’ asked the Squirradical.

‘The whole affair!’ cried Gideon. ‘That man has been ass enough to steal the cart and the dead body; what he hopes to do with it I neither know nor care. My hands are free, Jimson ceases; down with Jimson. Shake hands with me, Uncle Ned — Julia, darling girl, Julia, I — ’

‘Gideon, Gideon!’ said his uncle. ‘O, it’s all right, uncle, when we’re going to be married so soon,’ said Gideon. ‘You know you said so yourself in the houseboat.’

‘Did I?’ said Uncle Ned; ‘I am certain I said no such thing.’

‘Appeal to him, tell him he did, get on his soft side,’ cried Gideon. ‘He’s a real brick if you get on his soft side.’

‘Dear Mr Bloomfield,’ said Julia, ‘I know Gideon will be such a very good boy, and he has promised me to do such a lot of law, and I will see that he does too. And you know it is so very steadying to young men, everybody admits that; though, of course, I know I have no money, Mr Bloomfield,’ she added.

‘My dear young lady, as this rapscallion told you today on the boat, Uncle Ned has plenty,’ said the Squirradical, ‘and I can never forget that you have been shamefully defrauded. So as there’s nobody looking, you had better give your Uncle Ned a kiss. There, you rogue,’ resumed Mr Bloomfield, when the ceremony had been daintily performed, ‘this very pretty young lady is yours, and a vast deal more than you deserve. But now, let us get back to the houseboat, get up steam on the launch, and away back to town.’

‘That’s the thing!’ cried Gideon; ‘and tomorrow there will be no houseboat, and no Jimson, and no carrier’s cart, and no piano; and when Harker awakes on the ditchside, he may tell himself the whole affair has been a dream.’

‘Aha!’ said Uncle Ned, ‘but there’s another man who will have a different awakening. That fellow in the cart will find he has been too clever by half.’

‘Uncle Ned and Julia,’ said Gideon, ‘I am as happy as the King of Tartary, my heart is like a threepenny-bit, my heels are like feathers; I am out of all my troubles, Julia’s hand is in mine. Is this a time for anything but handsome sentiments? Why, there’s not room in me for anything that’s not angelic! And when I think of that poor unhappy devil in the cart, I stand here in the night and cry with a single heart God help him!’

‘Amen,’ said Uncle Ned.

CHAPTER XIII. The Tribulations of Morris: Part the Second

In a really polite age of literature I would have scorned to cast my eye again on the contortions of Morris. But the study is in the spirit of the day; it presents, besides, features of a high, almost a repulsive, morality; and if it should prove the means of preventing any respectable and inexperienced gentleman from plunging light-heartedly into crime, even political crime, this work will not have been penned in vain.

He rose on the morrow of his night with Michael, rose from the leaden slumber of distress, to find his hand tremulous, his eyes closed with rheum, his throat parched, and his digestion obviously paralysed. ‘Lord knows it’s not from eating!’ Morris thought; and as he dressed he reconsidered his position under several heads. Nothing will so well depict the troubled seas in which he was now voyaging as a review of these various anxieties. I have thrown them (for the reader’s convenience) into a certain order; but in the mind of one poor human equal they whirled together like the dust of hurricanes. With the same obliging preoccupation, I have put a name to each of his distresses; and it will be observed with pity that every individual item would have graced and commended the cover of a railway novel.

Anxiety the First: Where is the Body? or, The Mystery of Bent Pitman. It was now manifestly plain that Bent Pitman (as was to be looked for from his ominous appellation) belonged to the darker order of the criminal class. An honest man would not have cashed the bill; a humane man would not have accepted in silence the tragic contents of the water-butt; a man, who was not already up to the hilts in gore, would have lacked the means of secretly disposing them. This process of reasoning left a horrid image of the monster, Pitman. Doubtless he had long ago disposed of the body — dropping it through a trapdoor in his back kitchen, Morris supposed, with some hazy recollection of a picture in a penny dreadful; and doubtless the man now lived in wanton splendour on the proceeds of the bill. So far, all was peace. But with the profligate habits of a man like Bent Pitman (who was no doubt a hunchback in the bargain), eight hundred pounds could be easily melted in a week. When they were gone, what would he be likely to do next? A hell-like voice in Morris’s own bosom gave the answer: ‘Blackmail me.’

Anxiety the Second: The Fraud of the Tontine; or, Is my Uncle dead? This, on which all Morris’s hopes depended, was yet a question. He had tried to bully Teena; he had tried to bribe her; and nothing came of it. He had his moral conviction still; but you cannot blackmail a sharp lawyer on a moral conviction. And besides, since his interview with Michael, the idea wore a less attractive countenance. Was Michael the man to be blackmailed? and was Morris the man to do it? Grave considerations. ‘It’s not that I’m afraid of him,’ Morris so far condescended to reassure himself; ‘but I must be very certain of my ground, and the deuce of it is, I see no way. How unlike is life to novels! I wouldn’t have even begun this business in a novel, but what I’d have met a dark, slouching fellow in the Oxford Road, who’d have become my accomplice, and known all about how to do it, and probably broken into Michael’s house at night and found nothing but a waxwork image; and then blackmailed or murdered me. But here, in real life, I might walk the streets till I dropped dead, and none of the criminal classes would look near me. Though, to be sure, there is always Pitman,’ he added thoughtfully.

Anxiety the Third: The Cottage at Browndean; or, The Underpaid Accomplice. For he had an accomplice, and that accomplice was blooming unseen in a damp cottage in Hampshire with empty pockets. What could be done about that? He really ought to have sent him something; if it was only a post-office order for five bob, enough to prove that he was kept in mind, enough to keep him in hope, beer, and tobacco. ‘But what would you have?’ thought Morris; and ruefully poured into his hand a half-crown, a florin, and eightpence in small change. For a man in Morris’s position, at war with all society, and conducting, with the hand of inexperience, a widely ramified intrigue, the sum was already a derision. John would have to be doing; no mistake of that. ‘But then,’ asked the hell-like voice, ‘how long is John likely to stand it?’

Anxiety the Fourth: The Leather Business; or, The Shutters at Last: a Tale of the City. On this head Morris had no news. He had not yet dared to visit the family concern; yet he knew he must delay no longer, and if anything had been wanted to sharpen this conviction, Michael’s references of the night before rang ambiguously in his ear. Well and good. To visit the city might be indispensable; but what was he to do when he was there? He had no right to sign in his own name; and, with all the will in the world, he seemed to lack the art of signing with his uncle’s. Under these circumstances, Morris could do nothing to procrastinate the crash; and, when it came, when prying eyes began to be applied to every joint of his behaviour, two questions could not fail to be addressed, sooner or later, to a speechless and perspiring insolvent. Where is Mr Joseph Finsbury? and how about your visit to the bank? Questions, how easy to put! — ye gods, how impossible to answer! The man to whom they should be addressed went certainly to gaol, and — eh! what was this? — possibly to the gallows. Morris was trying to shave when this idea struck him, and he laid the razor down. Here (in Michael’s words) was the total disappearance of a valuable uncle; here was a time of inexplicable conduct on the part of a nephew who had been in bad blood with the old man any time these seven years; what a chance for a judicial blunder! ‘But no,’ thought Morris, ‘they cannot, they dare not, make it murder. Not that. But honestly, and speaking as a man to a man, I don’t see any other crime in the calendar (except arson) that I don’t seem somehow to have committed. And yet I’m a perfectly respectable man, and wished nothing but my due. Law is a pretty business.’

With this conclusion firmly seated in his mind, Morris Finsbury descended to the hall of the house in John Street, still half-shaven. There was a letter in the box; he knew the handwriting: John at last!

‘Well, I think I might have been spared this,’ he said bitterly, and tore it open.

Dear Morris [it ran], what the dickens do you mean by it? I’m in an awful hole down here; I have to go on tick, and the parties on the spot don’t cotton to the idea; they couldn’t, because it is so plain I’m in a stait of Destitution. I’ve got no bedclothes, think of that, I must have coins, the hole thing’s a Mockry, I wont stand it, nobody would. I would have come away before, only I have no money for the railway fare. Don’t be a lunatic, Morris, you don’t seem to understand my dredful situation. I have to get the stamp on tick. A fact.

— Ever your affte. Brother,

J. FINSBURY

‘Can’t even spell!’ Morris reflected, as he crammed the letter in his pocket, and left the house. ‘What can I do for him? I have to go to the expense of a barber, I’m so shattered! How can I send anybody coins? It’s hard lines, I daresay; but does he think I’m living on hot muffins? One comfort,’ was his grim reflection, ‘he can’t cut and run — he’s got to stay; he’s as helpless as the dead.’ And then he broke forth again: ‘Complains, does he? and he’s never even heard of Bent Pitman! If he had what I have on my mind, he might complain with a good grace.’

But these were not honest arguments, or not wholly honest; there was a struggle in the mind of Morris; he could not disguise from himself that his brother John was miserably situated at Browndean, without news, without money, without bedclothes, without society or any entertainment; and by the time he had been shaved and picked a hasty breakfast at a coffee tavern, Morris had arrived at a compromise.

‘Poor Johnny,’ he said to himself, ‘he’s in an awful box! I can’t send him coins, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do: I’ll send him the Pink Un — it’ll cheer John up; and besides, it’ll do his credit good getting anything by post.’

Accordingly, on his way to the leather business, whither he proceeded (according to his thrifty habit) on foot, Morris purchased and dispatched a single copy of that enlivening periodical, to which (in a sudden pang of remorse) he added at random the Athenaeum, the Revivalist, and the Penny Pictorial Weekly. So there was John set up with literature, and Morris had laid balm upon his conscience.

As if to reward him, he was received in his place of business with good news. Orders were pouring in; there was a run on some of the back stock, and the figure had gone up. Even the manager appeared elated. As for Morris, who had almost forgotten the meaning of good news, he longed to sob like a little child; he could have caught the manager (a pallid man with startled eyebrows) to his bosom; he could have found it in his generosity to give a cheque (for a small sum) to every clerk in the counting-house. As he sat and opened his letters a chorus of airy vocalists sang in his brain, to most exquisite music, ‘This whole concern may be profitable yet, profitable yet, profitable yet.’

To him, in this sunny moment of relief, enter a Mr Rodgerson, a creditor, but not one who was expected to be pressing, for his connection with the firm was old and regular.

‘O, Finsbury,’ said he, not without embarrassment, ‘it’s of course only fair to let you know — the fact is, money is a trifle tight — I have some paper out — for that matter, every one’s complaining — and in short — ’

‘It has never been our habit, Rodgerson,’ said Morris, turning pale. ‘But give me time to turn round, and I’ll see what I can do; I daresay we can let you have something to account.’

‘Well, that’s just where is,’ replied Rodgerson. ‘I was tempted; I’ve let the credit out of MY hands.’

‘Out of your hands?’ repeated Morris. ‘That’s playing rather fast and loose with us, Mr Rodgerson.’

‘Well, I got cent. for cent. for it,’ said the other, ‘on the nail, in a certified cheque.’

‘Cent. for cent.!’ cried Morris. ‘Why, that’s something like thirty per cent. bonus; a singular thing! Who’s the party?’

‘Don’t know the man,’ was the reply. ‘Name of Moss.’