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A little after dusk Ballantrae stumbled up to my side, feigned to fall, with a drunken laugh, and before he got his feet again, whispered me to "reel down into the cabin and seem to fall asleep upon a locker, for there would be need of me soon." I did as I was told, and coming into the cabin, where it was quite dark, let myself fall on the first locker.
There is scarcely a letter of Stevenson's that is without it, it plays about the slender volumes of essays or of travel that we know so well; but it is present not only in the lighter books and tales, not only in the enchanting fairy-tale, "Prince Otto," but in his most tragic, or his most intellectual work in the fragment "Weir of Hermiston," or in that fine piece of penetrating psychology and admirable narrative, The Master of Ballantrae.
He was not the man I should have hit upon in any throng as the reaver of my father's estate; still less the man who might be Margery's father. He had the face of all the Stairs of Ballantrae without its simple Scottish ruggedness; a sort of weasel face it was, with pale-gray eyes that had a trick of shifty dodging, and deep-furrowed about the mouth and chin with lines that spoke of indecision.
Henry must have won that midnight duel with the Master of Ballantrae, though the latter was the better swordsman. These incidents conform to truths we recognize. And not only in the fiction that clings close to actuality do we feel a sense of truth. We feel it just as keenly in fairy tales like those of Hans Christian Andersen, or in the worthiest wonder-legends of an earlier age.
This was well to be observed in the present instance; for here were Ballantrae and I, two gentlemen of the highest breeding, on the one hand; and on the other, Grady, a common mariner, and a man nearly a giant in physical strength. The case of Dutton is not in point, for I confess he did as well as any of us.
'The Master of Ballantrae' shouldered 'The Queen's Regulations, one would fancy with a swaggering hint of scorn; a battered copy of the 'Pilgrim's Progress' stood resignedly between Bogle's 'Mission to Thibet' and a technical handbook on Topography, the whole row being propped into position at one end by a great brown tobacco-jar, and at the other by a bronze image of the Buddha in cross-legged meditation a memento of Lenox's latest expedition to Thibet.
It was little wonder if Ballantrae, reading the scene with malevolent eyes, laughed out loud and brief, and drank with raised glass, "To the champion of the Fair." Marie-Madeleine stood in her old place within the counter; she disdained the mocking laughter; it fell on her ears, but it did not reach her spirit.
Mr. Baildon, for example, is perpetually lecturing Stevenson for his "pessimism"; surely a strange charge against a man who has done more than any modern artist to make men ashamed of their shame of life. But he complains that, in "The Master of Ballantrae" and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Stevenson gives evil a final victory over good.
"Never mind the path," says Ballantrae; "we must get shelter anyhow; let us pull straight ahead for the sides of the basin." But Heaven guided us; we touched ground at a thicket; scrambled ashore with our treasure; and having no other way of concealment, and the mist beginning already to lighten, hove down the skiff and let her sink.
I repeat, I am far from ashamed of my generous emotion; mercy is honourable in the warrior; and yet I cannot altogether censure Ballantrae, whose step was really fortunate, as we struck the path without further misadventure, and the same night, about sundown, came to the edge of the morass.
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