“Not wholly; and it would not matter if I did,” he replied. “Go your own way; you are beyond argument. And I am not sure that you will run more danger by that course than by any other. Give the servants time to get to bed and fall asleep, then take a country cross-road and walk, as the rhyme has it, like blazes all night. In the morning take a chaise or take the mail at pleasure, and continue your journey with all the decorum and reserve of which you shall be found capable.”
“I am taking the picture in,” I said. “Give me time. ’Tis the tout ensemble I must see: the whole as opposed to the details.”
“Mountebank!” he murmured.
“Yes, I have it now; and I see myself with a servant, and that servant is Rowley,” said I.
“So as to have one more link with your uncle?” suggested the lawyer. “Very judicious!”
“And, pardon me, but that is what it is,” I exclaimed. “Judicious is the word. I am not making a deception fit to last for thirty years; I do not found a palace in the living granite for the night. This is a shelter tent—a flying picture—seen, admired, and gone again in the wink of an eye. What is wanted, in short, is a trompe-l’œil that shall be good enough for twelve hours at an inn: is it not so?”
“It is, and the objection holds. Rowley is but another danger,” said Romaine.
“Rowley,” said I, “will pass as a servant from a distance—as a creature seen poised on the dicky of a bowling chaise. He will pass at hand as a smart, civil fellow one meets in the inn corridor, and looks back at, and asks, and is told, ‘Gentleman’s servant in Number 4.’ He will pass, in fact, all round, except with his personal friends! My dear sir, pray what do you expect? Of course, if we meet my cousin, or if we meet anybody who took part in the judicious exhibition of this evening, we are lost; and who’s denying it? To every disguise, however good and safe, there is always the weak point; you must always take (let us say—and to take a simile from your own waistcoat pocket) a snuffboxful of risk. You’ll get it just as small with Rowley as with anybody else. And the long and short of it is, the lad’s honest, he likes me, I trust him; he is my servant, or nobody.”
“He might not accept,” said Romaine.