HOW I LAY IN THE CLEFT OF A ROCK
On the third day of my confinement, and as near as I could tell about
midday, the small round porthole of my cabin was suddenly darkened by a
flap of sail let down from above, purposely I judged, and shortly
afterwards I found the ship was at rest.
It was after dark when Torode came in, and, without a word, bandaged my
eyes tightly, and then called in two of his men, who shouldered me, and
carried me up the companion and laid me in a boat. The passage was a short
one, about as far I thought as, say, from the anchorage at Herm to the
landing-place. Then they shouldered me again, and stumbled up a rocky way
and along a passage where their feet echoed hollowly, and finally laid me
down and went away. Torode untied my hands and feet and took off the
bandage.
By the light of his lantern I saw that I was in a rock room, with rough
natural walls, and sweet salt air blowing in from the farther end. There
was food and water, and a mattress and blanket. He left me without a word,
and locked behind him a grating of stout iron bars which filled all the
space between floor and roof. I was long past puzzling over the meaning of
it all. I ate my food, and lay down and slept.
A shaft of sunlight awoke me, and I examined my new prison with care. It
was a bit of a natural rock passage, such as I had often seen on Sercq,
formed, I have been told, by the decay of some softer material between two
masses of rock. It was about eight feet wide, and the roof, some twenty
feet above my head, was formed by the falling together of the sides which
sloped and narrowed somewhat at the entrance. In length, my room was thirty
paces from the iron grating to the opening in the face of the cliff. This
opening also was strongly barred with iron. The floor of the passage broke
off sharply there, and when I worked out a piece of rock from the side
wall, and dropped it through the bars, it seemed to fall straight into the
sea, a good hundred feet below. The left-hand wall stopped a foot beyond
the iron bars, but at the right hand the rock wall ran on for twenty feet
or so, then turned across the front of my window and so obscured the
outlook. I hated that rock wall for cutting off my view, but it was almost
all I had to look at, and before I said good-bye to it I knew every tendril
of every fern that grew on it, and the colours of all the veins that ran
through it, and of the close-creeping lichen that clothed it in patches.
By squeezing hard against the bars where they were let into the rock on the
right, I found I could just get a glimpse of the free blue sea rolling and
tossing outside, and by dint of observation and much careful watching I
learned where I was.
For, away out there among the tumbling blue waves, I could just make out a
double-headed rock which the tide never covered, and I recognised it as the
_Grand Amfroque,_ one of our steering points in Great Russel.
So, then, I was in Herm, not four miles away from Brecqhou, and though,
for any benefit the knowledge was to me, I might as well have been in
America itself, it still warmed my heart to think that Carette was there,
and almost within sight but for that wretched wall of rock. If fiery
longing could melt solid rock, that barrier had disappeared in the
twinkling of an eye.
The time passed very slowly with me. I spent most of it against the bars,
peering out at the sea. Once or twice distant boats passed across my narrow
view, and I wondered who were in them. And I thought sadly of the folk in
Peter Port still looking hopefully for the _Swallow_, and following her
possible fortunes, and wishing her good luck--and she and all her crew,
except myself, at the bottom of the sea, as foully murdered as ever men in
this world were.
Twice each day Torode himself brought me food and watched me steadfastly
while I ate it. His oversight and interest never seemed to slacken. At
first it troubled me, but there was in it nothing whatever of the captor
gloating over his prisoner; simply, as far as I could make out, a gloomy
desire to note how I took matters, which put me on my mettle to keep up a
bold front, though my heart was heavy enough at times at the puzzling
strangeness of it all.
I thought much of Carette and my mother, and my grandfather and Krok, and I
walked each day for hours, to and fro, to and fro, to keep myself from
falling sick or going stupid. But the time passed slower than time had ever
gone with me before, and I grew sick to death of that narrow cleft in the
rock.
By a mark I made on the wall for each day of my stay there, it was on the
tenth day that Torode first spoke to me as I ate my dinner.
"Listen!" he said, so unexpectedly, after his strange silence, that I
jumped in spite of myself.
"Once you asked to join us and I refused. Now you must join us--or die. I
have no desire for your death, but--well--you understand."
"When I asked to join you I believed you honest privateers. You are thieves
and murderers. I would sooner die than join you now."
"You are young to die so."
"Go where you can, die when you must," I answered in our Island saying.
"Better die young than live to dishonour."
He picked up my dishes and went out. But I could not see why he should have
kept me alive so long for the purpose of killing me now, and I would not
let my courage down.
One more attempt he made, three days later, without a word having passed
between us meanwhile.
"Your time is running out, mon gars," he said, as abruptly as before. "I am
loth to put you away, but it rests with yourself. You love Le Marchant's
girl, Carette. Join us, and you shall have her. You will live with us on
Herm, and in due time, when we have money enough, we will give up this life
and start anew elsewhere."
"Carette is an honest girl--"
"She need not know--all that you know."
"And your son wants her--"
When you have had no one to speak to but yourself for fourteen days, the
voice even of a man you hate is not to be despised. You may even make him
talk for the sake of hearing him.
"I know it," said Torode. "I hear she favours you, but a dead man is no
good. If you don't get her, as sure as the sun is in the sky the boy shall
have her."
"Even so I will not join you."
"And that is your last word?"
"My last word. I will not join you. I have lived honest. I will die
honest."
"Soit!" he growled, and went away, leaving me to somewhat gloomier
thoughts.