The Scottish Novels by Robert Louis Stevenson

Author:Robert Louis Stevenson [Robert Louis Stevenson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: IGP-002CBL
ISBN: 9781847675590
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 1995-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

25.

THE RETURN OF JAMES MORE

I WAS CALLED on the morrow out of a late and troubled slumber by a knocking on my door, ran to open it, and had almost swooned with the contrariety of my feelings, mostly painful; for on the threshold, in a rough wraprascal and an extraordinary big laced hat, there stood James More.

I ought to have been glad perhaps without admixture, for there was a sense in which the man came like an answer to prayer. I had been saying till my head was weary that Catriona and I must separate, and looking till my head ached for any possible means of separation. Here were the means come to me upon two legs, and joy was the hindmost of my thoughts. It is to be considered, however, that even if the weight of the future were lifted off me by the man’s arrival, the present heaved up the more black and menacing; so that, as I first stood before him in my shirt and breeches, I believe I took a leaping step backward like a person shot.

‘Ah,’ said he, ‘I have found you, Mr Balfour.’ And offered me his large, fine hand, the which (recovering at the same time my post in the doorway, as if with some thought of resistance) I took him by doubtfully. ‘It is a remarkable circumstance how our affairs appear to intermingle,’ he continued. ‘I am owing you an apology for an unfortunate intrusion upon yours, which I suffered myself to be entrapped into by my confidence in that false-face, Prestongrange; I think shame to own to you that I was ever trusting to a lawyer.’ He shrugged his shoulders with a very French air. ‘But indeed the man is very plausible,’ says he. ‘And now it seems that you have busied yourself handsomely in the matter of my daughter, for whose direction I was remitted to yourself.’

‘I think, sir,’ said I, with a very painful air, ‘that it will be necessary we two should have an explanation.’

‘There is nothing amiss?’ he asked. ‘My agent, Mr Sprott—’

‘For God’s sake moderate your voice!’ I cried. ‘She must not hear till we have had an explanation.’

‘She is in this place?’ cries he.

‘That is her chamber door,’ said I.

‘You are here with her alone?’ he asked.

‘And who else would I have got to stay with us?’ cries I.

I will do him the justice to admit that he turned pale.

‘This is very unusual,’ said he. ‘This is a very unusual circumstance. You are right, we must hold an explanation.’

So saying, he passed me by, and I must own the tall old rogue appeared at that moment extraordinary dignified. He had now, for the first time, the view of my chamber, which I scanned (I may say) with his eyes. A bit of morning sun glinted in by the window pane, and showed it off; my bed, my mails, and washing dish, with some disorder of my clothes, and the unlighted chimney, made the only plenishing;

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