Delphi Complete Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Illustrated)

by SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  When I came down in the morning, I found that he had been beforehand with me; for he was seated opposite my father at the window-table in the kitchen, their heads almost touching, and a little roll of gold pieces between them. As I came in my father looked up at me, and I saw a light of greed in his eyes such as I had never seen before. He caught up the money with an eager clutch and swept it into his pocket.

  “Very good, mister,” said he; “the room’s yours, and you pay always on the third of the month.”

  “Ah! and here is my first friend,” cried de Lapp, holding out his hand to me with a smile which was kindly enough, and yet had that touch of patronage which a man uses when he smiles to his dog. “I am myself again now, thanks to my excellent supper and good night’s rest. Ah! it is hunger that takes the courage from a man. That most, and cold next.”

  “Aye, that’s right,” said my father; “I’ve been out on the moors in a snow-drift for six-and-thirty hours, and ken what it’s like.”

  “I once saw three thousand men starve to death,” remarked de Lapp, putting out his hands to the fire. “Day by day they got thinner and more like apes, and they did come down to the edge of the pontoons where we did keep them, and they howled with rage and pain. The first few days their howls went over the whole city, but after a week our sentries on the bank could not hear them, so weak they had fallen.”

  “And they died!” I exclaimed.

  “They held out a very long time. Austrian Grenadiers they were, of the corps of Starowitz, fine stout men as big as your friend of yesterday; but when the town fell there were but four hundred alive, and a man could lift them three at a time as if they were little monkeys. It was a pity. Ah! my friend, you will do me the honours with madame and with mademoiselle.”

  It was my mother and Edie who had come into the kitchen. He had not seen them the night before, but now it was all I could do to keep my face as I watched him; for instead of our homely Scottish nod, he bent up his back like a louping trout, and slid his foot, and clapped his hand over his heart in the queerest way. My mother stared, for she thought he was making fun of her; but Cousin Edie fell into it in an instant, as though it had been a game, and away she went in a great curtsy until I thought she would have had to give it up, and sit down right there in the middle of the kitchen floor. But no, she up again as light as a piece of fluff, and we all drew up our stools and started on the scones and milk and porridge.

  He had a wonderful way with women, that man. Now if I were to do it, or Jim Horscroft, it would look as if we were playing the fool, and the girls would have laughed at us; but with him it seemed to go with his style of face and fashion of speech, so that one came at last to look for it: for when he spoke to my mother or Cousin Edie — and he was never backward in speaking — it would always be with a bow and a look as if it would hardly be worth their while to listen to what he had to say, and when they answered he would put on a face as though every word they said was to be treasured up and remembered for ever. And yet, even while he humbled himself to a woman, there was always a proud sort of look at the back of his eye as if he meant to say that it was only to them that he was so meek, and that he could be stiff enough upon occasion. As to my mother, it was wonderful the way she softened to him, and in half-an-hour she had told him all about her uncle, who was a surgeon in Carlisle, and the highest of any upon her side of the house. She spoke to him about my brother Rob’s death, which I had never heard her mention to a soul before, and he looked as if the tears were in his eyes over it — he, who had just told us how he had seen three thousand men starved to death! As to Edie, she did not say much, but she kept shooting little glances at our visitor, and once or twice he looked very hard at her.

  When he had gone to his room after breakfast, my father pulled out eight golden pounds and laid them on the table. “What think ye of that, Martha?” said he.

  “You’ve sold the twa black tups after all.”

  “No, but it’s a month’s pay for board and lodging from Jock’s friend, and as much to come every four weeks.”

  But my mother shook her head when she heard it.

  “Two pounds a week is over much,” said she; “and it is not when the poor gentleman is in distress that we should put such a price on his bit food.”

  “Tut!” cried my father, “he can very well afford it, and he with a bag full of gold. Besides, it’s his own proposing.”

  “No blessing will come from that money,” said she.

  “Why, woman, he’s turned your head wi’ his foreign ways of speech!” cried my father.

  “Aye, and it would be a good thing if Scottish men had a little more of that kindly way,” she said, and that was the first time in all my life that I had heard her answer him back.

  He came down soon and asked me whether I would come out with him. When we were in the sunshine he held out a little cross made of red stones, one of the bonniest things that ever I had set eyes upon.

  “These are rubies,” said he, “and I got it at Tudela, in Spain.

  There were two of them, but I gave the other to a Lithuanian girl.

  I pray that you will take this as a memory of your exceedingly kindness

  to me yesterday. It will fashion into a pin for your cravat.”

  I could but thank him for the present, which was of more value than anything I had ever owned in my life.

  “I am off to the upper muir to count the lambs,” said I; “maybe you would care to come up with me and see something of the country?”

  He hesitated for a moment, and then he shook his head.

  “I have some letters,” he said, “which I ought to write as soon as possible. I think that I will stay at quiet this morning and get them written.”

  All forenoon I was wandering over the links, and you may imagine that my mind was turning all the time upon this strange man whom chance had drifted to our doors. Where did he gain that style of his, that manner of command, that haughty menacing glint of the eye? And his experiences to which he referred so lightly, how wonderful the life must have been which had put him in the way of them! He had been kind to us, and gracious of speech, but still I could not quite shake myself clear of the distrust with which I had regarded him. Perhaps, after all, Jim Horscroft had been right and I had been wrong about taking him to West Inch.

  When I got back he looked as though he had been born and bred in the steading. He sat in the big wooden-armed ingle-chair, with the black cat on his knee. His arms were out, and he held a skein of worsted from hand to hand which my mother was busily rolling into a ball. Cousin Edie was sitting near, and I could see by her eyes that she had been crying.

  “Hullo, Edie!” said I, “what’s the trouble?”

  “Ah! mademoiselle, like all good and true women, has a soft heart,” said he. “I didn’t thought it would have moved her, or I should have been silent. I have been talking of the suffering of some troops of which I knew something when they were crossing the Guadarama mountains in the winter of 1808. Ah! yes, it was very bad, for they were fine men and fine horses. It is strange to see men blown by the wind over the precipices, but the ground was so slippery and there was nothing to which they could hold. So companies all linked arms, and they did better in that fashion; but one artilleryman’s hand came off as I held it, for he had had the frost-bite for three days.”

  I stood staring with my mouth open.

  “And the old Grenadiers, too, who were not so active as they used to be, they could not keep up; and yet if they lingered the peasants would catch them and crucify them to the barn doors with their feet up and a fire under their heads, which was a pity for these fine old soldiers. So when they could go no further, it was interesting to see what they would do; for they would sit down and say their prayers, sitting on an old saddle, or their knapsacks, maybe, and then take off their boots and their stockings, and lean their chin on the barrel of their musket. Then they would put their toe on the trigger, and pouf! it was all over, and there was no more marching for t
hose fine old Grenadiers. Oh, it was very rough work up there on these Guadarama mountains!”

  “And what army was this?” I asked.

  “Oh, I have served in so many armies that I mix them up sometimes. Yes, I have seen much of war. Apropos I have seen your Scotchmen fight, and very stout fantassins they make, but I thought from them, that the folk over here all wore — how do you say it? — petticoats.”

  “Those are the kilts, and they wear them only in the Highlands.”

  “Ah! on the mountains. But there is a man out yonder. Maybe he is the one who your father said would carry my letters to the post.”

  “Yes, he is Farmer Whitehead’s man. Shall I give them to him?”

  “Well, he would be more careful of them if he had them from your hand.”

  He took them from his pocket and gave them over to me. I hurried out with them, and as I did so my eyes fell upon the address of the topmost one. It was written very large and clear:

  A SON MAJESTE,

  LE ROI DE SUEDE,

  STOCKHOLM.

  I did not know very much French, but I had enough to make that out.

  What sort of eagle was this which had flown into our humble little nest?

  CHAPTER VII.

  THE CORRIEMUIR PEEL TOWER.

  Well, it would weary me, and I am very sure that it would weary you also, if I were to attempt to tell you how life went with us after this man came under our roof, or the way in which he gradually came to win the affections of every one of us. With the women it was quick work enough; but soon he had thawed my father too, which was no such easy matter, and had gained Jim Horscroft’s goodwill as well as my own. Indeed, we were but two great boys beside him, for he had been everywhere and seen everything; and of an evening he would chatter away in his limping English until he took us clean from the plain kitchen and the little farm steading, to plunge us into courts and camps and battlefields and all the wonders of the world. Horscroft had been sulky enough with him at first; but de Lapp, with his tact and his easy ways, soon drew him round, until he had quite won his heart, and Jim would sit with Cousin Edie’s hand in his, and the two be quite lost in listening to all that he had to tell us. I will not tell you all this; but even now, after so long an interval, I can trace how, week by week and month by month, by this word and that deed, he moulded us all as he wished.

  One of his first acts was to give my father the boat in which he had come, reserving only the right to have it back in case he should have need of it. The herring were down on the coast that autumn, and my uncle before he died had given us a fine set of nets, so the gift was worth many a pound to us. Sometimes de Lapp would go out in the boat alone, and I have seen him for a whole summer day rowing slowly along and stopping every half-dozen strokes to throw over a stone at the end of a string. I could not think what he was doing until he told me of his own freewill.

  “I am fond of studying all that has to do with the military,” said he, “and I never lose a chance. I was wondering if it would be a difficult matter for the commander of an army corps to throw his men ashore here.”

  “If the wind were not from the east,” said I.

  “Ah! quite so, if the wind were not from the east. Have you taken soundings here?”

  “No.”

  “Your line of battleships would have to lie outside; but there is water enough for a forty-gun frigate right up within musket range. Cram your boats with tirailleurs, deploy them behind these sandhills, then back with the launches for more, and a stream of grape over their heads from the frigates. It could be done! it could be done!”

  His moustaches bristled out more like a cat’s than ever, and I could see by the flash of his eyes that he was carried away by his dream.

  “You forget that our soldiers would be upon the beach,” said I indignantly.

  “Ta, ta, ta!” he cried. “Of course it takes two sides to make a battle. Let us see now; let us work it out. What could you get together? Shall we say twenty, thirty thousand. A few regiments of good troops: the rest, pouf! — conscripts, bourgeois with arms. How do you call them — volunteers?”

  “Brave men!” I shouted.

  “Oh yes, very brave men, but imbecile. Ah, mon Dieu, it is incredible how imbecile they would be! Not they alone, I mean, but all young troops. They are so afraid of being afraid that they would take no precaution. Ah, I have seen it! In Spain I have seen a battalion of conscripts attack a battery of ten pieces. Up they went, ah, so gallantly! and presently the hillside looked, from where I stood, like — how do you say it in English? — a raspberry tart. And where was our fine battalion of conscripts? Then another battalion of young troops tried it, all together in a rush, shouting and yelling; but what will shouting do against a mitraille of grape? And there was our second battalion laid out on the hillside. And then the foot chasseurs of the Guard, old soldiers, were told to take the battery; and there was nothing fine about their advance — no column, no shouting, nobody killed — just a few scattered lines of tirailleurs and pelotons of support; but in ten minutes the guns were silenced, and the Spanish gunners cut to pieces. War must be learned, my young friend, just the same as the farming of sheep.”

  “Pooh!” said I, not to be out-crowed by a foreigner. “If we had thirty thousand men on the line of the hill yonder, you would come to be very glad that you had your boats behind you.”

  “On the line of the hill?” said he, with a flash of his eyes along the ridge. “Yes, if your man knew his business he would have his left about your house, his centre on Corriemuir, and his right over near the doctor’s house, with his tirailleurs pushed out thickly in front. His horse, of course, would try to cut us up as we deployed on the beach. But once let us form, and we should soon know what to do. There’s the weak point, there at the gap. I would sweep it with my guns, then roll in my cavalry, push the infantry on in grand columns, and that wing would find itself up in the air. Eh, Jack, where would your volunteers be?”

  “Close at the heels of your hindmost man,” said I; and we both burst out into the hearty laugh with which such discussions usually ended.

  Sometimes when he talked I thought he was joking, and at other times it was not quite so easy to say. I well remember one evening that summer, when he was sitting in the kitchen with my father, Jim, and me, after the women had gone to bed, he began about Scotland and its relation to England.

  “You used to have your own king and your own laws made at Edinburgh,” said he. “Does it not fill you with rage and despair when you think that it all comes to you from London now?”

  Jim took his pipe out of his mouth.

  “It was we who put our king over the English; so if there’s any rage, it should have been over yonder,” said he.

  This was clearly news to the stranger, and it silenced him for the moment.

  “Well, but your laws are made down there, and surely that is not good,” he said at last.

  “No, it would be well to have a Parliament back in Edinburgh,” said my father; “but I am kept so busy with the sheep that I have little enough time to think of such things.”

  “It is for fine young men like you two to think of it,” said de Lapp. “When a country is injured, it is to its young men that it looks to avenge it.”

  “Aye! the English take too much upon themselves sometimes,” said Jim.

  “Well, if there are many of that way of thinking about, why should we not form them into battalions and march them upon London?” cried de Lapp.

  “That would be a rare little picnic,” said I, laughing. “And who would lead us?”

  He jumped up, bowing, with his hand on his heart, in his queer fashion.

  “If you will allow me to have the honour!” he cried; and then seeing that we were all laughing, he began to laugh also, but I am sure that there was really no thought of a joke in his mind.

  I could never make out what his age could be, nor could Jim Horscroft either. Sometimes we thought that he was an oldish man that looked young, and at o
thers that he was a youngish man who looked old. His brown, stiff, close-cropped hair needed no cropping at the top, where it thinned away to a shining curve. His skin too was intersected by a thousand fine wrinkles, lacing and interlacing, and was all burned, as I have already said, by the sun. Yet he was as lithe as a boy, and he was as tough as whalebone, walking all day over the hills or rowing on the sea without turning a hair. On the whole we thought that he might be about forty or forty-five, though it was hard to see how he could have seen so much of life in the time. But one day we got talking of ages, and then he surprised us.

  I had been saying that I was just twenty, and Jim said that he was twenty-seven.

  “Then I am the most old of the three,” said de Lapp.

  We laughed at this, for by our reckoning he might almost have been our father.

  “But not by so much,” said he, arching his brows. “I was nine-and-twenty in December.”

  And it was this even more than his talk which made us understand what an extraordinary life it must have been that he had led. He saw our astonishment, and laughed at it.

  “I have lived! I have lived!” he cried. “I have spent my days and my nights. I led a company in a battle where five nations were engaged when I was but fourteen. I made a king turn pale at the words I whispered in his ear when I was twenty. I had a hand in remaking a kingdom and putting a fresh king upon a great throne the very year that I came of age. Mon Dieu, I have lived my life!”

  That was the most that I ever heard him confess of his past life, and he only shook his head and laughed when we tried to get something more out of him. There were times when we thought that he was but a clever impostor; for what could a man of such influence and talents be loitering here in Berwickshire for? But one day there came an incident which showed us that he had indeed a history in the past.