The time for our escape drew near, and the nearer it came the less we
seemed to enjoy the prospect. There is but one side on which this castle
can be left either with dignity or safety; but as there is the main gate
and guard, and the chief street of the upper city, it is not to be
thought of by escaping prisoners. In all other directions an abominable
precipice surrounds it, down the face of which (if anywhere at all) we
must regain our liberty. By our concurrent labours in many a dark night,
working with the most anxious precautions against noise, we had made out
to pierce below the curtain about the south-west corner, in a place they
call the _Devil’s Elbow_. I have never met that celebrity; nor (if the
rest of him at all comes up to what they called his elbow) have I the
least desire of his acquaintance. From the heel of the masonry, the
rascally, breakneck precipice descended sheer among waste lands,
scattered suburbs of the city, and houses in the building. I had never
the heart to look for any length of time—the thought that I must make the
descent in person some dark night robbing me of breath; and, indeed, on
anybody not a seaman or a steeple-jack, the mere sight of the _Devil’s
Elbow_ wrought like an emetic.
I don’t know where the rope was got, and doubt if I much cared. It was
not that which gravelled me, but whether, now that we had it, it would
serve our turn. Its length, indeed, we made a shift to fathom out; but
who was to tell us how that length compared with the way we had to go?
Day after day, there would be always some of us stolen out to the
_Devil’s Elbow_ and making estimates of the descent, whether by a bare
guess or the dropping of stones. A private of pioneers remembered the
formula for that—or else remembered part of it and obligingly invented
the remainder. I had never any real confidence in that formula; and even
had we got it from a book, there were difficulties in the way of the
application that might have daunted Archimedes. We durst not drop any
considerable pebble lest the sentinels should hear, and those that we
dropped we could not hear ourselves. We had never a watch—or none that
had a second-hand; and though every one of us could guess a second to a
nicety, all somehow guessed it differently. In short, if any two set
forth upon this enterprise, they invariably returned with two opinions,
and often with a black eye in the bargain. I looked on upon these
proceedings, although not without laughter, yet with impatience and
disgust. I am one that cannot bear to see things botched or gone upon
with ignorance; and the thought that some poor devil was to hazard his
bones upon such premises, revolted me. Had I guessed the name of that
unhappy first adventurer, my sentiments might have been livelier still.
The designation of this personage was indeed all that remained for us to
do; and even in that we had advanced so far that the lot had fallen on
Shed B. It had been determined to mingle the bitter and the sweet; and
whoever went down first, the whole of his shed-mates were to follow next
in order. This caused a good deal of joy in Shed B, and would have
caused more if it had not still remained to choose our pioneer. In view
of the ambiguity in which we lay as to the length of the rope and the
height of the precipice—and that this gentleman was to climb down from
fifty to seventy fathoms on a pitchy night, on a rope entirely free, and
with not so much as an infant child to steady it at the bottom, a little
backwardness was perhaps excusable. But it was, in our case, more than a
little. The truth is, we were all womanish fellows about a height; and I
have myself been put, more than once, _hors de combat_ by a less affair
than the rock of Edinburgh Castle.
We discussed it in the dark and between the passage of the rounds; and it
was impossible for any body of men to show a less adventurous spirit. I
am sure some of us, and myself first among the number, regretted
Goguelat. Some were persuaded it was safe, and could prove the same by
argument; but if they had good reasons why some one else should make the
trial, they had better still why it should not be themselves. Others,
again, condemned the whole idea as insane; among these, as ill-luck would
have it, a seaman of the fleet; who was the most dispiriting of all. The
height, he reminded us, was greater than the tallest ship’s mast, the
rope entirely free; and he as good as defied the boldest and strongest to
succeed. We were relieved from this dead-lock by our sergeant-major of
dragoons.
‘Comrades,’ said he, ‘I believe I rank you all; and for that reason, if
you really wish it, I will be the first myself. At the same time, you
are to consider what the chances are that I may prove to be the last, as
well. I am no longer young—I was sixty near a month ago. Since I have
been a prisoner, I have made for myself a little _bedaine_. My arms are
all gone to fat. And you must promise not to blame me, if I fall and
play the devil with the whole thing.’
‘We cannot hear of such a thing!’ said I. ‘M. Laclas is the oldest man
here; and, as such, he should be the very last to offer. It is plain, we
must draw lots.’
‘No,’ said M. Laclas; ‘you put something else in my head! There is one
here who owes a pretty candle to the others, for they have kept his
secret. Besides, the rest of us are only rabble; and he is another
affair altogether. Let Champdivers—let the noble go the first.’
I confess there was a notable pause before the noble in question got his
voice. But there was no room for choice. I had been so ill-advised,
when I first joined the regiment, as to take ground on my nobility. I
had been often rallied on the matter in the ranks, and had passed under
the by-names of _Monseigneur_ and _the Marquis_. It was now needful I
should justify myself and take a fair revenge.
Any little hesitation I may have felt passed entirely unnoticed, from the
lucky incident of a round happening at that moment to go by. And during
the interval of silence there occurred something that sent my blood to
the boil. There was a private in our shed called Clausel, a man of a
very ugly disposition. He had made one of the followers of Goguelat;
but, whereas Goguelat had always a kind of monstrous gaiety about him,
Clausel was no less morose than he was evil-minded. He was sometimes
called _the General_, and sometimes by a name too ill-mannered for
repetition. As we all sat listening, this man’s hand was laid on my
shoulder, and his voice whispered in my ear: ‘If you don’t go, I’ll have
you hanged, Marquis!’
As soon as the round was past—‘Certainly, gentlemen!’ said I. ‘I will
give you a lead, with all the pleasure in the world. But, first of all,
there is a hound here to be punished. M. Clausel has just insulted me,
and dishonoured the French army; and I demand that he run the gauntlet of
this shed.’
There was but one voice asking what he had done, and, as soon as I had
told them, but one voice agreeing to the punishment. The General was, in
consequence, extremely roughly handled, and the next day was
congratulated by all who saw him on his _new decorations_. It was lucky
for us that he was one of the prime movers and believers in our project
of escape, or he had certainly revenged himself by a denunciation. As
for his feelings towards myself, they appeared, by his looks, to surpass
humanity; and I made up my mind to give him a wide berth in the future.
Had I been to go down that instant, I believe I could have carried it
well. But it was already too late—the day was at hand. The rest had
still to be summoned. Nor was this the extent of my misfortune; for the
next night, and the night after, were adorned with a perfect galaxy of
stars, and showed every cat that stirred in a quarter of a mile. During
this interval, I have to direct your sympathies on the Vicomte de
Saint-Yves! All addressed me softly, like folk round a sickbed. Our
Italian corporal, who had got a dozen of oysters from a fishwife, laid
them at my feet, as though I were a Pagan idol; and I have never since
been wholly at my ease in the society of shellfish. He who was the best
of our carvers brought me a snuff-box, which he had just completed, and
which, while it was yet in hand, he had often declared he would not part
with under fifteen dollars. I believe the piece was worth the money too!
And yet the voice stuck in my throat with which I must thank him. I
found myself, in a word, to be fed up like a prisoner in a camp of
anthropophagi, and honoured like the sacrificial bull. And what with
these annoyances, and the risky venture immediately ahead, I found my
part a trying one to play.
It was a good deal of a relief when the third evening closed about the
castle with volumes of sea-fog. The lights of Princes Street sometimes
disappeared, sometimes blinked across at us no brighter than the eyes of
cats; and five steps from one of the lanterns on the ramparts it was
already groping dark. We made haste to lie down. Had our jailers been
upon the watch, they must have observed our conversation to die out
unusually soon. Yet I doubt if any of us slept. Each lay in his place,
tortured at once with the hope of liberty and the fear of a hateful
death. The guard call sounded; the hum of the town declined by little
and little. On all sides of us, in their different quarters, we could
hear the watchman cry the hours along the street. Often enough, during
my stay in England, have I listened to these gruff or broken voices; or
perhaps gone to my window when I lay sleepless, and watched the old
gentleman hobble by upon the causeway with his cape and his cap, his
hanger and his rattle. It was ever a thought with me how differently
that cry would re-echo in the chamber of lovers, beside the bed of death,
or in the condemned cell. I might be said to hear it that night myself
in the condemned cell! At length a fellow with a voice like a bull’s
began to roar out in the opposite thoroughfare:
‘Past yin o’cloak, and a dark, haary moarnin’.’
At which we were all silently afoot.
As I stole about the battlements towards the—gallows, I was about to
write—the sergeant-major, perhaps doubtful of my resolution, kept close
by me, and occasionally proffered the most indigestible reassurances in
my ear. At last I could bear them no longer.
‘Be so obliging as to let me be!’ said I. ‘I am neither a coward nor a
fool. What do _you_ know of whether the rope be long enough? But I
shall know it in ten minutes!’
The good old fellow laughed in his moustache, and patted me.
It was all very well to show the disposition of my temper before a friend
alone; before my assembled comrades the thing had to go handsomely. It
was then my time to come on the stage; and I hope I took it handsomely.
‘Now, gentlemen,’ said I, ‘if the rope is ready, here is the criminal!’
The tunnel was cleared, the stake driven, the rope extended. As I moved
forward to the place, many of my comrades caught me by the hand and wrung
it, an attention I could well have done without.
‘Keep an eye on Clausel!’ I whispered to Laclas; and with that, got down
on my elbows and knees took the rope in both hands, and worked myself,
feet foremost, through the tunnel. When the earth failed under my feet,
I thought my heart would have stopped; and a moment after I was demeaning
myself in mid-air like a drunken jumping-jack. I have never been a model
of piety, but at this juncture prayers and a cold sweat burst from me
simultaneously.
The line was knotted at intervals of eighteen inches; and to the inexpert
it may seem as if it should have been even easy to descend. The trouble
was, this devil of a piece of rope appeared to be inspired, not with life
alone, but with a personal malignity against myself. It turned to the
one side, paused for a moment, and then spun me like a toasting-jack to
the other; slipped like an eel from the clasp of my feet; kept me all the
time in the most outrageous fury of exertion; and dashed me at intervals
against the face of the rock. I had no eyes to see with; and I doubt if
there was anything to see but darkness. I must occasionally have caught
a gasp of breath, but it was quite unconscious. And the whole forces of
my mind were so consumed with losing hold and getting it again, that I
could scarce have told whether I was going up or coming down.
Of a sudden I knocked against the cliff with such a thump as almost
bereft me of my sense; and, as reason twinkled back, I was amazed to find
that I was in a state of rest, that the face of the precipice here
inclined outwards at an angle which relieved me almost wholly of the
burthen of my own weight, and that one of my feet was safely planted on a
ledge. I drew one of the sweetest breaths in my experience, hugged
myself against the rope, and closed my eyes in a kind of ecstasy of
relief. It occurred to me next to see how far I was advanced on my
unlucky journey, a point on which I had not a shadow of a guess. I
looked up: there was nothing above me but the blackness of the night and
the fog. I craned timidly forward and looked down. There, upon a floor
of darkness, I beheld a certain pattern of hazy lights, some of them
aligned as in thoroughfares, others standing apart as in solitary houses;
and before I could well realise it, or had in the least estimated my
distance, a wave of nausea and vertigo warned me to lie back and close my
eyes. In this situation I had really but the one wish, and that was:
something else to think of! Strange to say, I got it: a veil was torn
from my mind, and I saw what a fool I was—what fools we had all been—and
that I had no business to be thus dangling between earth and heaven by my
arms. The only thing to have done was to have attached me to a rope and
lowered me, and I had never the wit to see it till that moment!
I filled my lungs, got a good hold on my rope, and once more launched
myself on the descent. As it chanced, the worst of the danger was at an
end, and I was so fortunate as to be never again exposed to any violent
concussion. Soon after I must have passed within a little distance of a
bush of wallflower, for the scent of it came over me with that impression
of reality which characterises scents in darkness. This made me a second
landmark, the ledge being my first. I began accordingly to compute
intervals of time: so much to the ledge, so much again to the wallflower,
so much more below. If I were not at the bottom of the rock, I
calculated I must be near indeed to the end of the rope, and there was no
doubt that I was not far from the end of my own resources. I began to be
light-headed and to be tempted to let go,—now arguing that I was
certainly arrived within a few feet of the level and could safely risk a
fall, anon persuaded I was still close at the top and it was idle to
continue longer on the rock. In the midst of which I came to a bearing
on plain ground, and had nearly wept aloud. My hands were as good as
flayed, my courage entirely exhausted, and, what with the long strain and
the sudden relief, my limbs shook under me with more than the violence of
ague, and I was glad to cling to the rope.
But this was no time to give way. I had (by God’s single mercy) got
myself alive out of that fortress; and now I had to try to get the
others, my comrades. There was about a fathom of rope to spare; I got it
by the end, and searched the whole ground thoroughly for anything to make
it fast to. In vain: the ground was broken and stony, but there grew not
there so much as a bush of furze.
‘Now then,’ thought I to myself, ‘here begins a new lesson, and I believe
it will prove richer than the first. I am not strong enough to keep this
rope extended. If I do not keep it extended the next man will be dashed
against the precipice. There is no reason why he should have my
extravagant good luck. I see no reason why he should not fall—nor any
place for him to fall on but my head.’
From where I was now standing there was occasionally visible, as the fog
lightened, a lamp in one of the barrack windows, which gave me a measure
of the height he had to fall and the horrid force that he must strike me
with. What was yet worse, we had agreed to do without signals: every so
many minutes by Laclas’ watch another man was to be started from the
battlements. Now, I had seemed to myself to be about half an hour in my
descent, and it seemed near as long again that I waited, straining on the
rope for my next comrade to begin. I began to be afraid that our
conspiracy was out, that my friends were all secured, and that I should
pass the remainder of the night, and be discovered in the morning, vainly
clinging to the rope’s end like a hooked fish upon an angle. I could not
refrain, at this ridiculous image, from a chuckle of laughter. And the
next moment I knew, by the jerking of the rope, that my friend had
crawled out of the tunnel and was fairly launched on his descent. It
appears it was the sailor who had insisted on succeeding me: as soon as
my continued silence had assured him the rope was long enough, Gautier,
for that was his name, had forgot his former arguments, and shown himself
so extremely forward, that Laclas had given way. It was like the fellow,
who had no harm in him beyond an instinctive selfishness. But he was
like to have paid pretty dearly for the privilege. Do as I would, I
could not keep the rope as I could have wished it; and he ended at last
by falling on me from a height of several yards, so that we both rolled
together on the ground. As soon as he could breathe he cursed me beyond
belief, wept over his finger, which he had broken, and cursed me again.
I bade him be still and think shame of himself to be so great a cry-baby.
Did he not hear the round going by above? I asked; and who could tell but
what the noise of his fall was already remarked, and the sentinels at the
very moment leaning upon the battlements to listen?
The round, however, went by, and nothing was discovered; the third man
came to the ground quite easily; the fourth was, of course, child’s play;
and before there were ten of us collected, it seemed to me that, without
the least injustice to my comrades, I might proceed to take care of
myself.
I knew their plan: they had a map and an almanack, and designed for
Grangemouth, where they were to steal a ship. Suppose them to do so, I
had no idea they were qualified to manage it after it was stolen. Their
whole escape, indeed, was the most haphazard thing imaginable; only the
impatience of captives and the ignorance of private soldiers would have
entertained so misbegotten a device; and though I played the good comrade
and worked with them upon the tunnel, but for the lawyer’s message I
should have let them go without me. Well, now they were beyond my help,
as they had always been beyond my counselling; and, without word said or
leave taken, I stole out of the little crowd. It is true I would rather
have waited to shake hands with Laclas, but in the last man who had
descended I thought I recognised Clausel, and since the scene in the shed
my distrust of Clausel was perfect. I believed the man to be capable of
any infamy, and events have since shown that I was right.