Fiction > Serialisations > London, 1896-1897 - St. Ives > Volume 13

98 THE PALL MALL MAGAZINE.
frilled shirt and waistcoat sprigged with forget-me-nots ! And the house would be
watched, perhaps. Every house around would be watched.
The end was that I wore through the remaining hours of darkness upon the
sodden hillside. Superlative Mrs. Gilchrist ! Folded in the mantle of that
Spartan dame ; huddled upon a boulder, while the rain descended upon my bare
head, and coursed clown my nose, and filled my shoes, and insinuated a playful
trickle down the ridge of my spine ; I hugged the lacerating fox of self-reproach,
and hugged it again, and set my teeth as it bit upon my vitals. Once, indeed,
I lifted an accusing arm to heaven. It was as if I had pulled the string of a
douche-bath. Heaven flooded the fool with gratuitous tears ; and the fool sat in
the puddle of them and knew his folly. But heaven at the same time mercifully
veiled that figure of abasement ; and I will lift but a corner of the sheet.
Wind in hidden gullies, and the talk of lapsing waters on the hillside, filled
all the spaces of the night. The high road lay at my feet, fifty yards or so below
my boulder. Soon after two o'clock (as I made it) lamps appeared in the direction
of Swanston, and drew nearer; and two hackney coaches passed me at a jog-trot,
towards the opaline haze into which the fog had subdued the lights of Edinburgh.
I heard one of the drivers curse as he went by, and inferred that my open-handed
cousin had shirked the weather and gone comfortably from the Assembly Rooms to
Dumbreck's Hotel and bed, leaving the chase to his mercenaries.
After this you are to believe that I dozed and woke by snatches. I watched
the moon descending in her foggy circle ; but I saw also the mulberry face and
minatory forefinger of Mr. Romaine, and caught myself explaining to him and
Mr. Robbie that their joint proposal to mortgage my inheritance for a flying
broomstick took no account of the working model of the whole Rock and Castle
of Edinburgh, which I dragged about by an ankle-chain. Anon I was pelting with
Rowley in a claret-coloured chaise through a cloud of robin-redbreasts ; and with
that I awoke to the veritable chatter of birds and the white light of dawn upon
the hills.
The truth is, I had come very near to the end of my endurance. Cold and
rain together, supervening in that hour of the spirit's default, may well have made
me light-headed ; nor was it easy to distinguish the tooth of self-reproach from that
of genuine hunger. Stiff, qualmish, vacant of body, heart and brain, I left my
penitential boulder and crawled down to the road. Glancing along it for sight or
warning of the runners, I spied, at two gunshots' distance or less, a milestone
with a splash of white upon it — a draggled placard. Abhorrent thought ! Did it
announce the price upon the head of Champdivers? "At least I will see how
they describe him " — this I told myself ; but that which tugged at my feet was
the baser fascination of fright. I had thought my spine inured by the night's
experiences to anything in the way of cold shivers. I discovered my mistake
while approaching that scrap of paper.
"AERIAL ASCENSION EXTRAORDINARY!!!
IN
THE MONSTRE BALLOON,
'LUNARDI.'
Professor Byfield (by diploma), the world-renowned
Exponent of Aerostatics and Aeronautics,
Has the honour to inform the nobility and gentry of Edinburgh and the neighbourhood "
The shock of it — the sudden descent upon sublimity according to Byfield — took
me in the face. I put up my hands. I broke into elfish laughter, and ended