第76章 CHARACTER AND ACQUIREMENTS OF MR.ROWLEY(3)

and that night (which we lay at Lichfield, I believe) there was no sleep for me in my bed.I put out the candle and lay down with a good resolution; and in a moment all was light about me like a theatre, and I saw myself upon the stage of it playing ignoble parts.I remembered France and my Emperor, now depending on the arbitrament of war, bent down, fighting on their knees and with their teeth against so many and such various assailants.And I burned with shame to be here in England, cherishing an English fortune, pursuing an English mistress, and not there, to handle a musket in my native fields, and to manure them with my body if I fell.I remembered that I belonged to France.All my fathers had fought for her, and some had died; the voice in my throat, the sight of my eyes, the tears that now sprang there, the whole man of me, was fashioned of French earth and born of a French mother; I had been tended and caressed by a succession of the daughters of France, the fairest, the most ill-starred; and I had fought and conquered shoulder to shoulder with her sons.A soldier, a noble, of the proudest and bravest race in Europe, it had been left to the prattle of a hobbledehoy lackey in an English chaise to recall me to the consciousness of duty.

When I saw how it was I did not lose time in indecision.The old classical conflict of love and honour being once fairly before me, it did not cost me a thought.I was a Saint-Yves de Keroual; and I decided to strike off on the morrow for Wakefield and Burchell Fenn, and embark, as soon as it should be morally possible, for the succour of my downtrodden fatherland and my beleaguered Emperor.

Pursuant on this resolve, I leaped from bed, made a light, and as the watchman was crying half-past two in the dark streets of Lichfield, sat down to pen a letter of farewell to Flora.And then - whether it was the sudden chill of the night, whether it came by association of ideas from the remembrance of Swanston Cottage I know not, but there appeared before me - to the barking of sheep-

dogs - a couple of snuffy and shambling figures, each wrapped in a plaid, each armed with a rude staff; and I was immediately bowed down to have forgotten them so long, and of late to have thought of them so cavalierly.

Sure enough there was my errand! As a private person I was neither French nor English; I was something else first: a loyal gentleman, an honest man.Sim and Candlish must not be left to pay the penalty of my unfortunate blow.They held my honour tacitly pledged to succour them; and it is a sort of stoical refinement entirely foreign to my nature to set the political obligation above the personal and private.If France fell in the interval for the lack of Anne de St.-Yves, fall she must! But I was both surprised and humiliated to have had so plain a duty bound upon me for so long - and for so long to have neglected and forgotten it.I think any brave man will understand me when I say that I went to bed and to sleep with a conscience very much relieved, and woke again in the morning with a light heart.The very danger of the enterprise reassured me: to save Sim and Candlish (suppose the worst to come to the worst) it would be necessary for me to declare myself in a court of justice, with consequences which I did not dare to dwell upon; it could never be said that I had chosen the cheap and the easy - only that in a very perplexing competition of duties I had risked my life for the most immediate.

We resumed the journey with more diligence: thenceforward posted day and night; did not halt beyond what was necessary for meals;

and the postillions were excited by gratuities, after the habit of my cousin Alain.For twopence I could have gone farther and taken four horses; so extreme was my haste, running as I was before the terrors of an awakened conscience.But I feared to be conspicuous.

Even as it was, we attracted only too much attention, with our pair and that white elephant, the seventy-pounds-worth of claret-

coloured chaise.

Meanwhile I was ashamed to look Rowley in the face.The young shaver had contrived to put me wholly in the wrong; he had cost me a night's rest and a severe and healthful humiliation; and I was grateful and embarrassed in his society.This would never do; it was contrary to all my ideas of discipline; if the officer has to blush before the private, or the master before the servant, nothing is left to hope for but discharge or death.I hit upon the idea of teaching him French; and accordingly, from Lichfield, I became the distracted master, and he the scholar - how shall I say?

indefatigable, but uninspired.His interest never flagged.He would hear the same word twenty times with profound refreshment, mispronounce it in several different ways, and forget it again with magical celerity.Say it happened to be STIRRUP.'No, I don't seem to remember that word, Mr.Anne,' he would say: 'it don't seem to stick to me, that word don't.' And then, when I had told it him again, 'ETRIER!' he would cry.'To be sure! I had it on the tip of my tongue.ETERIER!' (going wrong already, as if by a fatal instinct).'What will I remember it by, now? Why, INTERIOR, to be sure! I'll remember it by its being something that ain't in the interior of a horse.' And when next I had occasion to ask him the French for stirrup, it was a toss-up whether he had forgotten all about it, or gave me EXTERIOR for an answer.He was never a hair discouraged.He seemed to consider that he was covering the ground at a normal rate.He came up smiling day after day.'Now, sir, shall we do our French?' he would say; and I would put questions, and elicit copious commentary and explanation, but never the shadow of an answer.My hands fell to my sides; I could have wept to hear him.When I reflected that he had as yet learned nothing, and what a vast deal more there was for him to learn, the period of these lessons seemed to unroll before me vast as eternity, and I saw myself a teacher of a hundred, and Rowley a pupil of ninety, still hammering on the rudiments! The wretched boy, I should say, was quite unspoiled by the inevitable familiarities of the journey.He turned out at each stage the pink of serving-lads, deft, civil, prompt, attentive, touching his hat like an automaton, raising the status of Mr.Ramornie in the eyes of all the inn by his smiling service, and seeming capable of anything in the world but the one thing I had chosen - learning French!