The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson – Swanston Edition. Volume 20

“Listen! Heavens above us, what is that?”

“It sounds to me like Gow’s version of ‘The Caledonian Hunt’s Delight,’ on a brass band.”

Jealous powers! Had Olympus conspired to ridicule our love, that we must exchange our parting vows to the public strains of “The Caledonian Hunt’s Delight,” in Gow’s version and a semitone flat? For three seconds Flora and I (in the words of a later British bard) looked at each other with a wild surmise, silent. Then she darted to the path, and gazed along it down the hill.

“We must run, Anne. There are more coming!”

We left the scattered relics of breakfast, and, taking hands, scurried along the path northwards. A few yards, and with a sharp turn it led us out of the cutting and upon the hillside. And here we pulled up together with a gasp.

Right beneath us lay a green meadow, dotted with a crowd of two or three hundred people; and over the nucleus of this gathering, where it condensed into a black swarm, as of bees, there floated, not only the dispiriting music of “The Caledonian Hunt’s Delight,” but an object of size and shape suggesting the Genie escaped from the Fisherman’s Bottle, as described in M. Galland’s ingenious “Thousand and One Nights.” It was Byfield’s balloon – the monster Lunardi– in process of inflation.

“Confound Byfield!” I ejaculated in my haste.

“Who is Byfield?”

“An aëronaut, my dear, of bilious humour; which no doubt accounts for his owning a balloon striped alternately with liver-colour and pale blue, and for his arranging it and a brass band in the very line of my escape. That man dogs me like fate.” I broke off sharply. “And after all, why not?” I mused.

The next instant I swung round, as Flora uttered a piteous little cry; and there, behind us, in the outlet of the cutting, stood Major Chevenix and Ronald.

The boy stepped forward, and, ignoring my bow, laid a hand on Flora’s arm.

“You will come home at once.”

I touched his shoulder. “Surely not,” I said, “seeing that the spectacle apparently wants but ten minutes of its climax.”

He swung on me in a passion. “For God’s sake, St. Ives, don’t force a quarrel now, of all moments! Man, haven’t you compromised my sister enough?”

“It seems to me that, having set a watch on your sister at the suggestion, and with the help of a casual Major of Foot, you might in decency reserve the word ‘compromise’ for home consumption; and further, that against adversaries so poorly sensitive to her feelings, your sister may be pardoned for putting her resentment into action.”

“Major Chevenix is a friend of the family.” But the lad blushed as he said it.

“The family?” I echoed. “So? Pray did your aunt invite his help? No, no, my dear Ronald; you cannot answer that. And while you play the game of insult to your sister, sir, I will see that you eat the discredit of it.”

“Excuse me,” interposed the Major, stepping forward. “As Ronald said, this is not the moment for quarrelling; and, as you observed, sir, the climax is not so far off. The runner and his men are even now coming round the hill. We saw them mounting the slope, and (I may add) your cousin’s carriage drawn up on the road below. The fact is, Miss Gilchrist has been traced to the hill: and as it secretly occurred to us that the quarry might be her objective, we arranged to take the ascent on this side. See there!” he cried, and flung out a hand.

I looked up. Sure enough, at that instant, a grey-coated figure appeared on the summit of the hill, not five hundred yards away to the left. He was followed closely by my friend of the moleskin waistcoat; and the pair came sidling down the slope towards us.

“Gentlemen,” said I, “it appears that I owe you my thanks. Your stratagem in any case was kindly meant.”

“There was Miss Gilchrist to consider,” said the Major stiffly. But Ronald cried, “Quick, St. Ives! Make a dash back by the quarry path. I warrant we don’t hinder.”

“Thank you, my friend: I have another notion. Flora,” I said, and took her hand, “here is our parting. The next five minutes will decide much. Be brave, dearest; and your thoughts go with me till I come again.”

“Wherever you go, I’ll think of you. Whatever happens, I’ll love you. Go, and God defend you, Anne!” Her breast heaved, as she faced the Major, red and shame-fast, indeed, but gloriously defiant.

“Quick!” cried she and her brother together. I kissed her hand and sprang down the hill.

I heard a shout behind me; and, glancing back, saw my pursuers, three now, with my full-bodied cousin for whipper-in – change their course as I leapt a brook and headed for the crowded enclosure. A somnolent fat man, bulging, like a feather-bed, on a three-legged stool, dozed at the receipt of custom, with a deal table and a bowl of sixpences before him. I dashed on him with a crown-piece.

“No change given,” he objected, waking up and fumbling with a bundle of pink tickets.

“None required.” I snatched the ticket and ran through the gateway.

I gave myself time for another look before mingling with the crowd. The moleskin waistcoat was leading now, and had reached the brook; with red-head a yard or two behind, and my cousin, a very bad third, panting – it pleased me to imagine how sorely – across the lower slopes to the eastward. The janitor leaned against his toll-bar and still followed me with a stare. Doubtless by my uncovered head and gala dress he judged me an all-night reveller – a strayed Bacchanal fooling in the morrow’s eye.

Prompt upon the inference came inspiration. I must win to the centre of the crowd, and a crowd is invariably indulgent to a drunkard. I hung out the glaring sign-board of crapulous glee. Lurching, hiccoughing, jostling, apologising to all and sundry with spacious incoherence, I plunged my way through the sightseers, and they gave me passage with all the good-humour in life.

I believe that I descended upon that crowd as a godsend, a dancing rivulet of laughter. They needed entertainment. A damper, less enthusiastic company never gathered to a public show. Though the rain had ceased, and the sun shone, those who possessed umbrellas were not to be coaxed, but held them aloft with a settled air of gloom which defied the lenitives of nature and the spasmodic cajolery of the worst band in Edinburgh. “It’ll be near full, Jock?” “It wull.” “He’ll be startin’ in a meenit?” “Aiblins he wull.” “Wull this be the sixt time ye’ve seen him?” “I shudna wonder.” It occurred to me that, had we come to bury Byfield, not to praise him, we might have displayed a blither interest.

Byfield himself, bending from the car beneath his gently swaying canopy of liver-colour and pale blue, directed the proceedings with a mien of saturnine preoccupation. He may have been calculating the receipts. As I squeezed to the front, his underlings were shifting the pipe which conveyed the hydrogen gas, and the Lunardi strained gently at its ropes. Somebody with a playful thrust sent me staggering into the clear space beneath.

And here a voice hailed and fetched me up with a round turn.

“Ducie, by all that’s friendly! Playmate of my youth and prop of my declining years, how goes it?”

It was the egregious Dalmahoy. He clung and steadied himself by one of the dozen ropes binding the car to earth; and with an air of doing it all by his unaided cleverness – an air so indescribably, so majestically drunken, that I could have blushed for the poor expedients which had carried me through the throng.

“You’ll excuse me if I don’t let go. Fact is, we’ve been keeping it up a bit all night. Byfield leaves us – to expatiate in realms untrodden by the foot of man —

“‘The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air;Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear.’

But Byfield does it – Byfield in his Monster Foolardi. One stroke of this knife (always supposing I miss my own hand), and the rope is severed: our common friend scales the empyrean. But he’ll come back – oh, never doubt he’ll come back! – and begin the dam business over again. Tha’s the law ’gravity ’cording to Byfield.”

Mr. Dalmahoy concluded inconsequently with a vocal imitation of a post-horn; and, looking up, I saw the head and shoulders of Byfield projected over the rim of the car.

He drew the natural inference from my dress and demeanour, and groaned aloud.

“O, go away – get out of it, Ducie! Isn’t one natural born ass enough for me to deal with? You fellows are guying the whole show!”

“Byfield!” I called up eagerly, “I’m not drunk. Reach me down the ladder, quick! A hundred guineas if you’ll take me with you!” I saw over the crowd, not ten deep behind me, the red head of the man in grey.

“That proves it,” said Byfield. “Go away; or at least keep quiet. I’m going to make a speech.” He cleared his throat. “Ladies and gentlemen – ”

I held up my packet of notes, “Here’s the money – for pity’s sake, man! There are bailiffs after me, in the crowd!”

“ – the spectacle which you have honoured with your enlightened patronage – I tell you I can’t.” He cast a glance behind him into the car – “with your enlightened patronage, needs but few words of introduction or commendation.”

“Hear, hear!” from Dalmahoy.

“Your attendance proves the sincerity of your interest – ”

I spread out the notes under his eyes. He blinked, but resolutely lifted his voice.

“The spectacle of a solitary voyager – ”

“Two hundred!” I called up.

“The spectacle of two hundred solitary voyagers – cradled in the brain of a Montgolfier and a Charles – O, stop it! I’m no public speaker! How the deuce – ?”

There was a lurch and a heave in the crowd. “Pitch oot the drunken loon!” cried a voice. The next moment I heard my cousin bawling for a clear passage. With the tail of my eye I caught a glimpse of his plethoric perspiring face as he came charging past the barrels of the hydrogen-apparatus; and, with that, Byfield had shaken down a rope-ladder and fixed it, and I was scrambling up like a cat.

“Cut the ropes!”

“Stop him!” my cousin bawled. “Stop the balloon! It’s Champdivers, the murderer!”

“Cut the ropes!” vociferated Byfield; and to my infinite relief I saw that Dalmahoy was doing his best. A hand clutched at my heel. I let out viciously, amid a roar of the crowd; felt the kick reach and rattle home on somebody’s teeth; and, as the crowd made a rush and the balloon swayed and shot upwards, heaved myself over the rim into the car.

Recovering myself on the instant, I bent over. I had on my tongue a neat farewell for Alain, but the sight of a hundred upturned and contorted faces silenced me as a blow might. There had lain my real peril, in the sudden wild-beast rage now suddenly baffled. I read it, as clear as print, and sickened. Nor was Alain in a posture to listen. My kick had sent Moleskin flying on top of him; and borne to earth, prone beneath the superincumbent bulk of his retainer, he lay with hands outspread like a swimmer’s and nose buried in the plashy soil.

CHAPTER XXXIII

THE INCOMPLETE AËRONAUTS

All this I took in at a glance: I dare say in three seconds or less. The hubbub beneath us dropped to a low, rumbling bass. Suddenly a woman’s scream divided it – one high-pitched, penetrating scream, followed by silence. And then, as a pack of hounds will start into cry, voice after voice caught up the scream and reduplicated it until the whole enclosure rang with alarm.

“Hullo!” Byfield called to me: “what the deuce is happening now?” and ran to his side of the car. “Good Lord, it’s Dalmahoy!”

It was. Beneath us, at the tail of a depending rope, that unhappy lunatic dangled between earth and sky. He had been the first to cut the tether; and, having severed it below his grasp, had held on while the others cut loose, taking even the asinine precaution to loop the end twice round his wrist. Of course the upward surge of the balloon had heaved him off his feet, and his muddled instinct did the rest. Clutching now with both hands, he was borne aloft like a lamb from the flock.

So we reasoned afterwards. “The grapnel!” gasped Byfield: for Dalmahoy’s rope was fastened beneath the floor of the car, and not to be reached by us. We fumbled to cast the grapnel loose, and shouted down together —

“For God’s sake hold on! Catch the anchor when it comes! You’ll break your neck if you drop!”

He swung into sight again beyond the edge of the floor, and uplifted a strained, white face.

We cast loose the grapnel, lowered it and jerked it towards him. He swung past it like a pendulum, caught at it with one hand, and missed: came flying back on the receding curve, and missed again. At the third attempt he blundered right against it, and flung an arm over one of the flukes, next a leg, and in a trice we were hauling up, hand over hand.

We dragged him inboard. He was pale, but undefeatedly voluble.

“Must apologise to you fellows, really. Dam silly, clumsy kind of thing to do; might have been awkward too. Thank you, Byfield, my boy, I will: two fingers only – a harmless steadier.”

He took the flask and was lifting it. But his jaw dropped and his hand hung arrested.

“He’s going to faint,” I cried. “The strain – ”

“Strain on your grandmother, Ducie! What’s that?”

He was staring past my shoulder, and on the instant I was aware of a voice – not the aëronaut’s – speaking behind me, and, as it were, out of the clouds —

“I tak’ ye to witness, Mister Byfield – ”

Consider, if you please. For six days I had been oscillating within a pretty complete circumference of alarms. It is small blame to me, I hope, that with my nerve on so nice a pivot, I quivered and swung to this new apprehension like a needle in a compass-box.

On the floor of the car, at my feet, lay a heap of plaid rugs and overcoats, from which, successively and painfully disinvolved, there emerged first a hand clutching a rusty beaver hat, next a mildly indignant face, in spectacles, and finally the rearward of a very small man in a seedy suit of black. He rose on his knees, his finger-tips resting on the floor, and contemplated the aëronaut over his glasses with a world of reproach.

“I tak’ ye to witness, Mr. Byfield!”

Byfield mopped a perspiring brow.

“My dear sir,” he stammered, “all a mistake – no fault of mine – explain presently”; then, as one catching at an inspiration, “Allow me to introduce you. Mr. Dalmahoy, Mr. – ”

“My name is Sheepshanks,” said the little man stiffly. “But you’ll excuse me – ”

Mr. Dalmahoy interrupted with a playful cat-call.

“Hear, hear! Silence! ‘His name is Sheepshanks. On the Grampian Hills his father kept his flocks – a thousand sheep,’ and, I make no doubt, shanks in proportion. Excuse you, Sheepshanks? My dear sir! At this altitude one shank was more than we had a right to expect: the plural multiplies the obligation.” Keeping a tight hold on his hysteria, Dalmahoy steadied himself by a rope and bowed.

“And I, sir,” – as Mr. Sheepshanks’ thoroughly bewildered gaze travelled around and met mine – “I, sir, am the Vicomte Anne de Kéroual de Saint-Yves, at your service. I haven’t a notion how or why you come to be here: but you seem likely to be an acquisition. On my part,” I continued, as there leapt into my mind the stanza I had vainly tried to recover in Mrs. McRankine’s sitting-room, “I have the honour to refer you to the inimitable Roman, Flaccus —

“‘Virtus, recludens immeritis moriCoelum negata temptat iter via,Coetusque vulgares et udamSpernit humum fugiente penna’

– you have the Latin, sir?”

“Not a word.” He subsided upon the pile of rugs and spread out his hands in protest. “I tak’ ye to witness, Mr. Byfield!”

“Then in a minute or so I will do myself the pleasure of construing,” said I, and turned to scan the earth we were leaving – I had not guessed how rapidly.

We contemplated it from the height of six hundred feet – or so Byfield asserted after consulting his barometer. He added that this was a mere nothing: the wonder was the balloon had risen at all with one-half of the total folly of Edinburgh clinging to the car. I passed the possible inaccuracy and certain ill-temper of this calculation. He had (he explained) made jettison of at least a hundred-weight of sand ballast. I could only hope it had fallen on my cousin. To me, six hundred feet appeared a very respectable eminence. And the view was ravishing.

The Lunardi, mounting through a stagnant calm in a line almost vertical, had pierced the morning mists, and now swam emancipated in a heaven of exquisite blue. Below us, by some trick of eyesight, the country had grown concave, its horizons curving up like the rim of a shallow bowl – a bowl heaped, in point of fact, with sea-fog, but to our eyes with a froth delicate and dazzling as a whipped syllabub of snow. Upon it the travelling shadow of the balloon became no shadow but a stain: an amethyst (you might call it) purged of all grosser properties than colour and lucency. At times thrilled by no perceptible wind, rather by the pulse of the sun’s rays, the froth shook and parted: and then behold, deep in the crevasses, vignetted and shining, an acre or two of the earth of man’s business and fret – tilled slopes of the Lothians, ships dotted on the Forth, the capital like a hive that some child had smoked – the ear of fancy could almost hear it buzzing.

I snatched the glass from Byfield, and brought it to focus upon one of these peepshow rifts: and lo! at the foot of the shaft, imaged, as it were, far down in a luminous well, a green hillside and three figures standing. A white speck fluttered; and fluttered until the rift closed again. Flora’s handkerchief! Blessings on the brave hand that waved it! – at a moment when (as I have since heard and knew without need of hearing) her heart was down in her shoes, or, to speak accurately, in the milkmaid Janet’s. Singular in many things, she was at one with the rest of her sex in its native and incurable distrust of man’s inventions.

I am bound to say that my own faith in aërostatics was a plant – a sensitive plant – of extremely tender growth. Either I failed, a while back, in painting the emotions of my descent of the Devil’s Elbow, or the reader knows that I am a chicken-hearted fellow about a height. I make him a present of the admission. Set me on a plane superficies, and I will jog with all the insouciance of a rolling stone: toss me in air, and, with the stone in the child’s adage, I am in the hands of the devil. Even to the qualified instability of a sea-going ship I have ever committed myself with resignation rather than confidence.

But to my unspeakable relief the Lunardi floated upwards, and continued to float, almost without a tremor. Only by reading the barometer, or by casting scraps of paper overboard, could we tell that the machine moved at all. Now and again we revolved slowly: so Byfield’s compass informed us, but for ourselves we had never guessed it. Of dizziness I felt no longer a symptom, for the sufficient reason that the provocatives were nowhere at hand. We were the only point in space, without possibility of comparison with another. We were made one with the clean silences receiving us; and speaking only for the Vicomte Anne de Saint-Yves, I dare assert that for five minutes a newly bathed infant had not been less conscious of original sin.

“But look here, you know” – it was Byfield at my elbow – “I’m a public character, by George; and this puts me in a devilish awkward position.”

“So it does,” I agreed. “You proclaimed yourself a solitary voyager: and here, to the naked eye, are four of us.”

“And pray how can I help that? If, at the last moment, a couple of lunatics come rushing in – ”

“They still leave Sheepshanks to be accounted for.” Byfield began to irritate me. I turned to the stowaway. “Perhaps,” said I, “Mr. Sheepshanks will explain.”

“I paid in advance,” Mr. Sheepshanks began, eager to seize the opening presented. “The fact is, I’m a married man.”

“Already at two points you have the advantage of us. Proceed, sir.”

“You were good enough, just now, to give me your name, Mr. – ”

“The Vicomte Anne de Kéroual de Saint-Yves.”

“It is a somewhat difficult name to remember.”

“If that be all, sir, within two minutes you shall have a memoria technica prepared for use during the voyage.”

Mr. Sheepshanks harked back. “I am a married man, and – d’ye see? – Mrs. Sheepshanks, as you might say, has no sympathy with ballooning. She was a Guthrie of Dumfries.”

“Which accounts for it, to be sure,” said I.

“To me, sir, on the contrary, aërostatics have long been an alluring study. I might even, Mr. – , I might even, I say, term it the passion of my life.” His mild eyes shone behind their glasses. “I remember Vincent Lunardi, sir. I was present in Heriot’s Gardens when he made an ascension there in October ’85. He came down at Cupar. The Society of Gentlemen Golfers at Cupar presented him with an address; and at Edinburgh he was admitted Knight Companion of the Beggar’s Benison, a social company, or (as I may say) crew, since defunct. A thin-faced man, sir. He wore a peculiar bonnet, if I may use the expression, very much cocked up behind. The shape became fashionable. He once pawned his watch with me, sir; that being my profession. I regret to say he redeemed it subsequently: otherwise I might have the pleasure of showing it to you. O yes, the theory of ballooning has long been a passion with me. But in deference to Mrs. Sheepshanks I have abstained from the actual practice – until to-day. To tell you the truth, my wife believes me to be brushing off the cobwebs in the Kyles of Bute.”

“Are there any cobwebs in the Kyles of Bute?” asked Dalmahoy, in a tone unnaturally calm.

“A figure of speech, sir – as one might say, holiday-keeping there. I paid Mr. Byfield five pounds in advance. I have his receipt. And the stipulation was that I should be concealed in the car and make the ascension with him alone.”

“Are we then to take it, sir, that our company offends you?” I demanded.

He made haste to disclaim. “Not at all: decidedly not in the least. But the chances were for less agreeable associates.” I bowed. “And a bargain’s a bargain,” he wound up.

“So it is,” said I. “Byfield, hand Mr. Sheepshanks back his five pounds.”

“O, come now!” the aëronaut objected. “And who may you be, to be ordering a man about?”

“I believe I have already answered that question twice in your hearing.”

“Mosha the Viscount Thingamy de Something-or-other? I dare say!”

“Have you any objection?”

“Not the smallest. For all I care, you are Robert Burns, or Napoleon Buonaparte, or anything, from the Mother of the Gracchi to Balaam’s Ass. But I knew you first as Mr. Ducie; and you may take it that I’m Mr. Don’t-see.” He reached up a hand towards the valve-string.

“What are you proposing to do?”

“To descend.”

“What? – back to the enclosure?”

“Scarcely that, seeing that we have struck a northerly current, and are travelling at the rate of thirty miles an hour, perhaps. That’s Broad Law to the south of us, as I make it out.”

“But why descend at all?”

“Because it sticks in my head that some one in the crowd called you by a name that wasn’t Ducie; and by a title, for that matter, which didn’t sound like ‘Viscount.’ I took it at the time for a constable’s trick; but I begin to have my strong doubts.”

The fellow was dangerous. I stooped nonchalantly on pretence of picking up a plaid; for the air had turned bitterly cold of a sudden.

“Mr. Byfield, a word in your private ear, if you will.”

“As you please,” said he, dropping the valve-string.

We leaned together over the breastwork of the car. “If I mistake not,” I said, speaking low, “the name was Champdivers.”

He nodded.

“The gentleman who raised that foolish but infernally risky cry was my own cousin, the Viscount de Saint-Yves. I give you my word of honour to that.” Observing that this staggered him, I added, mighty slily, “I suppose it doesn’t occur to you now that the whole affair was a game, for a friendly wager?”

“No,” he answered brutally, “it doesn’t. And what’s more, it won’t go down.”

“In that respect,” said I, with a sudden change of key, “it resembles your balloon. But I admire the obstinacy of your suspicions; since, as a matter of fact, I am Champdivers.”

“The mur – ”

“Certainly not. I killed the man in fair duel.”

“Ha!” he eyed me with sour distrust. “That is what you have to prove.”