Tales and Fantasies
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Robert Louis Stevenson >> Tales and Fantasies
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The night had come; the fanlight over the door shone bright;
the two windows of the dining-room where the cloth was being
laid, and the three windows of the drawing-room where Maria
would be waiting dinner, glowed softlier through yellow
blinds. It was like a vision of the past. All this time of
his absence life had gone forward with an equal foot, and the
fires and the gas had been lighted, and the meals spread, at
the accustomed hours. At the accustomed hour, too, the bell
had sounded thrice to call the family to worship. And at the
thought, a pang of regret for his demerit seized him; he
remembered the things that were good and that he had
neglected, and the things that were evil and that he had
loved; and it was with a prayer upon his lips that he mounted
the steps and thrust the key into the key-hole.
He stepped into the lighted hall, shut the door softly behind
him, and stood there fixed in wonder. No surprise of
strangeness could equal the surprise of that complete
familiarity. There was the bust of Chalmers near the stair-
railings, there was the clothes-brush in the accustomed
place; and there, on the hat-stand, hung hats and coats that
must surely be the same as he remembered. Ten years dropped
from his life, as a pin may slip between the fingers; and the
ocean and the mountains, and the mines, and crowded marts and
mingled races of San Francisco, and his own fortune and his
own disgrace, became, for that one moment, the figures of a
dream that was over.
He took off his hat, and moved mechanically toward the stand;
and there he found a small change that was a great one to
him. The pin that had been his from boyhood, where he had
flung his balmoral when he loitered home from the Academy,
and his first hat when he came briskly back from college or
the office - his pin was occupied. 'They might have at least
respected my pin!' he thought, and he was moved as by a
slight, and began at once to recollect that he was here an
interloper, in a strange house, which he had entered almost
by a burglary, and where at any moment he might be
scandalously challenged.
He moved at once, his hat still in his hand, to the door of
his father's room, opened it, and entered. Mr. Nicholson sat
in the same place and posture as on that last Sunday morning;
only he was older, and greyer, and sterner; and as he now
glanced up and caught the eye of his son, a strange commotion
and a dark flush sprung into his face.
'Father,' said John, steadily, and even cheerfully, for this
was a moment against which he was long ago prepared, 'father,
here I am, and here is the money that I took from you. I
have come back to ask your forgiveness, and to stay Christmas
with you and the children.'
'Keep your money,' said the father, 'and go!'
'Father!' cried John; 'for God's sake don't receive me this
way. I've come for - '
'Understand me,' interrupted Mr. Nicholson; 'you are no son
of mine; and in the sight of God, I wash my hands of you.
One last thing I will tell you; one warning I will give you;
all is discovered, and you are being hunted for your crimes;
if you are still at large it is thanks to me; but I have done
all that I mean to do; and from this time forth I would not
raise one finger - not one finger - to save you from the
gallows! And now,' with a low voice of absolute authority,
and a single weighty gesture of the finger, 'and now - go!'
CHAPTER VI - THE HOUSE AT MURRAYFIELD
How John passed the evening, in what windy confusion of mind,
in what squalls of anger and lulls of sick collapse, in what
pacing of streets and plunging into public-houses, it would
profit little to relate. His misery, if it were not
progressive, yet tended in no way to diminish; for in
proportion as grief and indignation abated, fear began to
take their place. At first, his father's menacing words lay
by in some safe drawer of memory, biding their hour. At
first, John was all thwarted affection and blighted hope;
next bludgeoned vanity raised its head again, with twenty
mortal gashes: and the father was disowned even as he had
disowned the son. What was this regular course of life, that
John should have admired it? what were these clock-work
virtues, from which love was absent? Kindness was the test,
kindness the aim and soul; and judged by such a standard, the
discarded prodigal - now rapidly drowning his sorrows and his
reason in successive drams - was a creature of a lovelier
morality than his self-righteous father. Yes, he was the
better man; he felt it, glowed with the consciousness, and
entering a public-house at the corner of Howard Place
(whither he had somehow wandered) he pledged his own virtues
in a glass - perhaps the fourth since his dismissal. Of that
he knew nothing, keeping no account of what he did or where
he went; and in the general crashing hurry of his nerves,
unconscious of the approach of intoxication. Indeed, it is a
question whether he were really growing intoxicated, or
whether at first the spirits did not even sober him. For it
was even as he drained this last glass that his father's
ambiguous and menacing words - popping from their hiding-
place in memory - startled him like a hand laid upon his
shoulder. 'Crimes, hunted, the gallows.' They were ugly
words; in the ears of an innocent man, perhaps all the
uglier; for if some judicial error were in act against him,
who should set a limit to its grossness or to how far it
might be pushed? Not John, indeed; he was no believer in the
powers of innocence, his cursed experience pointing in quite
other ways; and his fears, once wakened, grew with every hour
and hunted him about the city streets.
It was, perhaps, nearly nine at night; he had eaten nothing
since lunch, he had drunk a good deal, and he was exhausted
by emotion, when the thought of Houston came into his head.
He turned, not merely to the man as a friend, but to his
house as a place of refuge. The danger that threatened him
was still so vague that he knew neither what to fear nor
where he might expect it; but this much at least seemed
undeniable, that a private house was safer than a public inn.
Moved by these counsels, he turned at once to the Caledonian
Station, passed (not without alarm) into the bright lights of
the approach, redeemed his portmanteau from the cloak-room,
and was soon whirling in a cab along the Glasgow Road. The
change of movement and position, the sight of the lamps
twinkling to the rear, and the smell of damp and mould and
rotten straw which clung about the vehicle, wrought in him
strange alternations of lucidity and mortal giddiness.
'I have been drinking,' he discovered; 'I must go straight to
bed, and sleep.' And he thanked Heaven for the drowsiness
that came upon his mind in waves.
From one of these spells he was wakened by the stoppage of
the cab; and, getting down, found himself in quite a country
road, the last lamp of the suburb shining some way below, and
the high walls of a garden rising before him in the dark.
The Lodge (as the place was named), stood, indeed, very
solitary. To the south it adjoined another house, but
standing in so large a garden as to be well out of cry; on
all other sides, open fields stretched upward to the woods of
Corstorphine Hill, or backward to the dells of Ravelston, or
downward toward the valley of the Leith. The effect of
seclusion was aided by the great height of the garden walls,
which were, indeed, conventual, and, as John had tested in
former days, defied the climbing schoolboy. The lamp of the
cab threw a gleam upon the door and the not brilliant handle
of the bell.
'Shall I ring for ye?' said the cabman, who had descended
from his perch, and was slapping his chest, for the night was
bitter.
'I wish you would,' said John, putting his hand to his brow
in one of his accesses of giddiness.
The man pulled at the handle, and the clanking of the bell
replied from further in the garden; twice and thrice he did
it, with sufficient intervals; in the great frosty silence of
the night the sounds fell sharp and small.
'Does he expect ye?' asked the driver, with that manner of
familiar interest that well became his port-wine face; and
when John had told him no, 'Well, then,' said the cabman, 'if
ye'll tak' my advice of it, we'll just gang back. And that's
disinterested, mind ye, for my stables are in the Glesgie
Road.'
'The servants must hear,' said John.
'Hout!' said the driver. 'He keeps no servants here, man.
They're a' in the town house; I drive him often; it's just a
kind of a hermitage, this.'
'Give me the bell,' said John; and he plucked at it like a
man desperate.
The clamour had not yet subsided before they heard steps upon
the gravel, and a voice of singular nervous irritability
cried to them through the door, 'Who are you, and what do you
want?'
'Alan,' said John, 'it's me - it's Fatty - John, you know.
I'm just come home, and I've come to stay with you.'
There was no reply for a moment, and then the door was
opened.
'Get the portmanteau down,' said John to the driver.
'Do nothing of the kind,' said Alan; and then to John, 'Come
in here a moment. I want to speak to you.'
John entered the garden, and the door was closed behind him.
A candle stood on the gravel walk, winking a little in the
draughts; it threw inconstant sparkles on the clumped holly,
struck the light and darkness to and fro like a veil on
Alan's features, and sent his shadow hovering behind him.
All beyond was inscrutable; and John's dizzy brain rocked
with the shadow. Yet even so, it struck him that Alan was
pale, and his voice, when he spoke, unnatural.
'What brings you here to-night?' he began. 'I don't want,
God knows, to seem unfriendly; but I cannot take you in,
Nicholson; I cannot do it.'
'Alan,' said John, 'you've just got to! You don't know the
mess I'm in; the governor's turned me out, and I daren't show
my face in an inn, because they're down on me for murder or
something!'
'For what?' cried Alan, starting.
'Murder, I believe,' says John.
'Murder!' repeated Alan, and passed his hand over his eyes.
'What was that you were saying?' he asked again.
'That they were down on me,' said John. 'I'm accused of
murder, by what I can make out; and I've really had a
dreadful day of it, Alan, and I can't sleep on the roadside
on a night like this - at least, not with a portmanteau,' he
pleaded.
'Hush!' said Alan, with his head on one side; and then, 'Did
you hear nothing?' he asked.
'No,' said John, thrilling, he knew not why, with
communicated terror. 'No, I heard nothing; why?' And then,
as there was no answer, he reverted to his pleading: 'But I
say, Alan, you've just got to take me in. I'll go right away
to bed if you have anything to do. I seem to have been
drinking; I was that knocked over. I wouldn't turn you away,
Alan, if you were down on your luck.'
'No?' returned Alan. 'Neither will you, then. Come and
let's get your portmanteau.'
The cabman was paid, and drove off down the long, lamp-
lighted hill, and the two friends stood on the side-walk
beside the portmanteau till the last rumble of the wheels had
died in silence. It seemed to John as though Alan attached
importance to this departure of the cab; and John, who was in
no state to criticise, shared profoundly in the feeling.
When the stillness was once more perfect, Alan shouldered the
portmanteau, carried it in, and shut and locked the garden
door; and then, once more, abstraction seemed to fall upon
him, and he stood with his hand on the key, until the cold
began to nibble at John's fingers.
'Why are we standing here?' asked John.
'Eh?' said Alan, blankly.
'Why, man, you don't seem yourself,' said the other.
'No, I'm not myself,' said Alan; and he sat down on the
portmanteau and put his face in his hands.
John stood beside him swaying a little, and looking about him
at the swaying shadows, the flitting sparkles, and the steady
stars overhead, until the windless cold began to touch him
through his clothes on the bare skin. Even in his bemused
intelligence, wonder began to awake.
'I say, let's come on to the house,' he said at last.
'Yes, let's come on to the house,' repeated Alan.
And he rose at once, reshouldered the portmanteau, and taking
the candle in his other hand, moved forward to the Lodge.
This was a long, low building, smothered in creepers; and
now, except for some chinks of light between the dining-room
shutters, it was plunged in darkness and silence.
In the hall Alan lighted another candle, gave it to John, and
opened the door of a bedroom.
'Here,' said he; 'go to bed. Don't mind me, John. You'll be
sorry for me when you know.'
'Wait a bit,' returned John; 'I've got so cold with all that
standing about. Let's go into the dining-room a minute.
Just one glass to warm me, Alan.'
On the table in the hall stood a glass, and a bottle with a
whisky label on a tray. It was plain the bottle had been
just opened, for the cork and corkscrew lay beside it.
'Take that,' said Alan, passing John the whisky, and then
with a certain roughness pushed his friend into the bedroom,
and closed the door behind him.
John stood amazed; then he shook the bottle, and, to his
further wonder, found it partly empty. Three or four glasses
were gone. Alan must have uncorked a bottle of whisky and
drank three or four glasses one after the other, without
sitting down, for there was no chair, and that in his own
cold lobby on this freezing night! It fully explained his
eccentricities, John reflected sagely, as he mixed himself a
grog. Poor Alan! He was drunk; and what a dreadful thing
was drink, and what a slave to it poor Alan was, to drink in
this unsociable, uncomfortable fashion! The man who would
drink alone, except for health's sake - as John was now doing
- was a man utterly lost. He took the grog out, and felt
hazier, but warmer. It was hard work opening the portmanteau
and finding his night things; and before he was undressed,
the cold had struck home to him once more. 'Well,' said he;
'just a drop more. There's no sense in getting ill with all
this other trouble.' And presently dreamless slumber buried
him.
When John awoke it was day. The low winter sun was already
in the heavens, but his watch had stopped, and it was
impossible to tell the hour exactly. Ten, he guessed it, and
made haste to dress, dismal reflections crowding on his mind.
But it was less from terror than from regret that he now
suffered; and with his regret there were mingled cutting
pangs of penitence. There had fallen upon him a blow, cruel,
indeed, but yet only the punishment of old misdoing; and he
had rebelled and plunged into fresh sin. The rod had been
used to chasten, and he had bit the chastening fingers. His
father was right; John had justified him; John was no guest
for decent people's houses, and no fit associate for decent
people's children. And had a broader hint been needed, there
was the case of his old friend. John was no drunkard, though
he could at times exceed; and the picture of Houston drinking
neat spirits at his hall-table struck him with something like
disgust. He hung back from meeting his old friend. He could
have wished he had not come to him; and yet, even now, where
else was he to turn?
These musings occupied him while he dressed, and accompanied
him into the lobby of the house. The door stood open on the
garden; doubtless, Alan had stepped forth; and John did as he
supposed his friend had done. The ground was hard as iron,
the frost still rigorous; as he brushed among the hollies,
icicles jingled and glittered in their fall; and wherever he
went, a volley of eager sparrows followed him. Here were
Christmas weather and Christmas morning duly met, to the
delight of children. This was the day of reunited families,
the day to which he had so long looked forward, thinking to
awake in his own bed in Randolph Crescent, reconciled with
all men and repeating the footprints of his youth; and here
he was alone, pacing the alleys of a wintry garden and filled
with penitential thoughts.
And that reminded him: why was he alone? and where was Alan?
The thought of the festal morning and the due salutations
reawakened his desire for his friend, and he began to call
for him by name. As the sound of his voice died away, he was
aware of the greatness of the silence that environed him.
But for the twittering of the sparrows and the crunching of
his own feet upon the frozen snow, the whole windless world
of air hung over him entranced, and the stillness weighed
upon his mind with a horror of solitude.
Still calling at intervals, but now with a moderated voice,
he made the hasty circuit of the garden, and finding neither
man nor trace of man in all its evergreen coverts, turned at
last to the house. About the house the silence seemed to
deepen strangely. The door, indeed, stood open as before;
but the windows were still shuttered, the chimneys breathed
no stain into the bright air, there sounded abroad none of
that low stir (perhaps audible rather to the ear of the
spirit than to the ear of the flesh) by which a house
announces and betrays its human lodgers. And yet Alan must
be there - Alan locked in drunken slumbers, forgetful of the
return of day, of the holy season, and of the friend whom he
had so coldly received and was now so churlishly neglecting.
John's disgust redoubled at the thought, but hunger was
beginning to grow stronger than repulsion, and as a step to
breakfast, if nothing else, he must find and arouse this
sleeper.
He made the circuit of the bedroom quarters. All, until he
came to Alan's chamber, were locked from without, and bore
the marks of a prolonged disuse. But Alan's was a room in
commission, filled with clothes, knickknacks, letters, books,
and the conveniences of a solitary man. The fire had been
lighted; but it had long ago burned out, and the ashes were
stone cold. The bed had been made, but it had not been slept
in.
Worse and worse, then; Alan must have fallen where he sat,
and now sprawled brutishly, no doubt, upon the dining-room
floor.
The dining-room was a very long apartment, and was reached
through a passage; so that John, upon his entrance, brought
but little light with him, and must move toward the windows
with spread arms, groping and knocking on the furniture.
Suddenly he tripped and fell his length over a prostrate
body. It was what he had looked for, yet it shocked him; and
he marvelled that so rough an impact should not have kicked a
groan out of the drunkard. Men had killed themselves ere now
in such excesses, a dreary and degraded end that made John
shudder. What if Alan were dead? There would be a
Christmas-day!
By this, John had his hand upon the shutters, and flinging
them back, beheld once again the blessed face of the day.
Even by that light the room had a discomfortable air. The
chairs were scattered, and one had been overthrown; the
table-cloth, laid as if for dinner, was twitched upon one
side, and some of the dishes had fallen to the floor. Behind
the table lay the drunkard, still unaroused, only one foot
visible to John.
But now that light was in the room, the worst seemed over; it
was a disgusting business, but not more than disgusting; and
it was with no great apprehension that John proceeded to make
the circuit of the table: his last comparatively tranquil
moment for that day. No sooner had he turned the corner, no
sooner had his eyes alighted on the body, than he gave a
smothered, breathless cry, and fled out of the room and out
of the house.
It was not Alan who lay there, but a man well up in years, of
stern countenance and iron-grey locks; and it was no
drunkard, for the body lay in a black pool of blood, and the
open eyes stared upon the ceiling.
To and fro walked John before the door. The extreme
sharpness of the air acted on his nerves like an astringent,
and braced them swiftly. Presently, he not relaxing in his
disordered walk, the images began to come clearer and stay
longer in his fancy; and next the power of thought came back
to him, and the horror and danger of his situation rooted him
to the ground.
He grasped his forehead, and staring on one spot of gravel,
pieced together what he knew and what he suspected. Alan had
murdered some one: possibly 'that man' against whom the
butler chained the door in Regent Terrace; possibly another;
some one at least: a human soul, whom it was death to slay
and whose blood lay spilled upon the floor. This was the
reason of the whisky drinking in the passage, of his
unwillingness to welcome John, of his strange behaviour and
bewildered words; this was why he had started at and harped
upon the name of murder; this was why he had stood and
hearkened, or sat and covered his eyes, in the black night.
And now he was gone, now he had basely fled; and to all his
perplexities and dangers John stood heir.
'Let me think - let me think,' he said, aloud, impatiently,
even pleadingly, as if to some merciless interrupter. In the
turmoil of his wits, a thousand hints and hopes and threats
and terrors dinning continuously in his ears, he was like one
plunged in the hubbub of a crowd. How was he to remember -
he, who had not a thought to spare - that he was himself the
author, as well as the theatre, of so much confusion? But in
hours of trial the junto of man's nature is dissolved, and
anarchy succeeds.
It was plain he must stay no longer where he was, for here
was a new Judicial Error in the very making. It was not so
plain where he must go, for the old Judicial Error, vague as
a cloud, appeared to fill the habitable world; whatever it
might be, it watched for him, full-grown, in Edinburgh; it
must have had its birth in San Francisco; it stood guard, no
doubt, like a dragon, at the bank where he should cash his
credit; and though there were doubtless many other places,
who should say in which of them it was not ambushed? No, he
could not tell where he was to go; he must not lose time on
these insolubilities. Let him go back to the beginning. It
was plain he must stay no longer where he was. It was plain,
too, that he must not flee as he was, for he could not carry
his portmanteau, and to flee and leave it was to plunge
deeper in the mire. He must go, leave the house unguarded,
find a cab, and return - return after an absence? Had he
courage for that?
And just then he spied a stain about a hand's-breadth on his
trouser-leg, and reached his finger down to touch it. The
finger was stained red: it was blood; he stared upon it with
disgust, and awe, and terror, and in the sharpness of the new
sensation, fell instantly to act.
He cleansed his finger in the snow, returned into the house,
drew near with hushed footsteps to the dining-room door, and
shut and locked it. Then he breathed a little freer, for
here at least was an oaken barrier between himself and what
he feared. Next, he hastened to his room, tore off the
spotted trousers which seemed in his eyes a link to bind him
to the gallows, flung them in a corner, donned another pair,
breathlessly crammed his night things into his portmanteau,
locked it, swung it with an effort from the ground, and with
a rush of relief, came forth again under the open heavens.
The portmanteau, being of occidental build, was no feather-
weight; it had distressed the powerful Alan; and as for John,
he was crushed under its bulk, and the sweat broke upon him
thickly. Twice he must set it down to rest before he reached
the gate; and when he had come so far, he must do as Alan
did, and take his seat upon one corner. Here then, he sat a
while and panted; but now his thoughts were sensibly
lightened; now, with the trunk standing just inside the door,
some part of his dissociation from the house of crime had
been effected, and the cabman need not pass the garden wall.
It was wonderful how that relieved him; for the house, in his
eyes, was a place to strike the most cursory beholder with
suspicion, as though the very windows had cried murder.
But there was to be no remission of the strokes of fate. As
he thus sat, taking breath in the shadow of the wall and
hopped about by sparrows, it chanced that his eye roved to
the fastening of the door; and what he saw plucked him to his
feet. The thing locked with a spring; once the door was
closed, the bolt shut of itself; and without a key, there was
no means of entering from without.
He saw himself obliged to one of two distasteful and perilous
alternatives; either to shut the door altogether and set his
portmanteau out upon the wayside, a wonder to all beholders;
or to leave the door ajar, so that any thievish tramp or
holiday schoolboy might stray in and stumble on the grisly
secret. To the last, as the least desperate, his mind
inclined; but he must first insure himself that he was
unobserved. He peered out, and down the long road; it lay
dead empty. He went to the corner of the by-road that comes
by way of Dean; there also not a passenger was stirring.
Plainly it was, now or never, the high tide of his affairs;
and he drew the door as close as he durst, slipped a pebble
in the chink, and made off downhill to find a cab.
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