Kidnapped (1886)

Charles Baxter

MY DEAR CHARLES BAXTER:

If you ever read this tale, you will likely ask yourself more questions
than I should care to answer: as for instance how the Appin murder has
come to fall in the year 1751, how the Torran rocks have crept so near
to Earraid, or why the printed trial is silent as to all that touches
David Balfour. These are nuts beyond my ability to crack. But if you
tried me on the point of Alan's guilt or innocence, I think I could
defend the reading of the text. To this day you will find the tradition
of Appin clear in Alan's favour. If you inquire, you may even hear that
the descendants of "the other man" who fired the shot are in the country
to this day. But that other man's name, inquire as you please, you shall
not hear; for the Highlander values a secret for itself and for the
congenial exercise of keeping it I might go on for long to justify one
point and own another indefensible; it is more honest to confess at once
how little I am touched by the desire of accuracy. This is no furniture
for the scholar's library, but a book for the winter evening school-room
when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near; and honest
Alan, who was a grim old fire-eater in his day has in this new avatar
no more desperate purpose than to steal some young gentleman's attention
from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century,
and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle with his dreams.

As for you, my dear Charles, I do not even ask you to like this tale.
But perhaps when he is older, your son will; he may then be pleased to
find his father's name on the fly-leaf; and in the meanwhile it pleases
me to set it there, in memory of many days that were happy and some (now
perhaps as pleasant to remember) that were sad. If it is strange for
me to look back from a distance both in time and space on these bygone
adventures of our youth, it must be stranger for you who tread the same
streets--who may to-morrow open the door of the old Speculative,
where we begin to rank with Scott and Robert Emmet and the beloved and
inglorious Macbean--or may pass the corner of the close where that great
society, the L. J. R., held its meetings and drank its beer, sitting in
the seats of Burns and his companions. I think I see you, moving there
by plain daylight, beholding with your natural eyes those places that
have now become for your companion a part of the scenery of dreams. How,
in the intervals of present business, the past must echo in your memory!
Let it not echo often without some kind thoughts of your friend,

R.L.S. SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH.

The hand of Providence brought me in my drifting to the very doors of the British Linen Company's bank.

In the fear of which, and lest any one should complain of scurvy usage, he hastens to protest that all went well with both, in the limited and human sense of the word "well"' that whatever befell them, it was not dishonor, and whatever failed them, they were not found wanting to themselves.