“You gave me that last night,” I said, holding the scrap of paper before
me. “You knew what was in it?”
“I didn't know, sir; I guessed. Poor gentleman's wife, sir? I thought
so, sir.”
“Robert Hinge, you're an Englishman, and you've served your queen.”
“And king as well, sir. King William was on the throne when I joined,
sir.”
“How long have you known this unhappy gentleman, this Count Rossano, who
is imprisoned here?”
“Eight years and over.”
The man stood bolt upright before me until I gave him the word to stand
at ease. I questioned him closely, and with a growing belief in him.
This was the substance of what I heard from him: He had been in General
Rodetzsky's service for a year or thereabouts when he first came to
visit the fortress. The stables in which the general's horses were
bestowed were in themselves beautifully tidy, but outside, immediately
beside the door, was a great heap of manure and rotten straw, the
accumulation of years, which was an eyesore to the new groom, who took
immediate measures for removing it. He was at work at it a whole day and
then left it. Returning a week later to his task, he thrust the prongs
of his pitchfork through a pane of glass which lay hidden by the rubbish
heap, and heard not only the crash and fall of the glass itself, but
a startled cry. A peasant was in charge of the cart which was carrying
away the refuse heap, and Robert Hinge took no apparent notice of this
cry. He knew that the fortress was a prison. He had heard queer stories
about the treatment the Austrians gave their prisoners. His interest
was awakened, and his fancy began to be excited. When he had filled the
cart, and the peasant had gone away, Hinge cleared from the wall the
remainder of the heap, and found that he had laid bare a grated window
almost on a level with the ground. The glass was so thickly incrusted
with filth as to be as opaque as the wall by which it was surrounded,
but at the broken pane a face appeared. The man in telling me the story
was honestly moved. He could not describe the condition of the man he
saw without imprecations on his jailer and the whole country that held
them. He told me that the prisoner's hair grew to his waist, and was of
a dreadful unwholesome gray; that his beard and mustache were matted,
his eyes were sunken, and his face was unwashed and of the color of
stale unbaked bread. The man spoke with difficulty, but had a fair
knowledge of English, though he seemed unused to it. He had inhabited
that hole in the earth for years. How many years he did not know until
Hinge, in answer to his questions, told him the date of the year and the
day of the month. The conversation was interrupted by the coming of
an officer, and Hinge covered up the window before anything was seen.
Afterwards he broke a few more panes and heaped clean straw against
the wall to hide the window, but in such a fashion as to admit air and
light. Many hundreds of times he had sat outside his stable door within
arm's-length of the prisoner, and had listened to him while he talked.
They had a preconcerted signal at which the prisoner instantly ceased
to speak. Food and water were thrust in upon the unhappy man at regular
intervals, but he was never visited, and lived a horrible, lonely death
in life there, which made the flesh creep to hear of. The stench of
the chamber Hinge described as something horrible and sickening, and he
thought it a marvel that the man had lived so long.
The wretched man had never been allowed a minute's exercise outside
his cell, and Brunow's pretence of having seen him was, of course, an
invention. That did not surprise me, but I hated Brunow for it. The
man's shallow and worthless spirit could go hovering about a tragedy
like this with his butterfly irresponsible lies. The thought made me
angry.
“Hinge,” I said, when the groom had told me all he had to say, “I am
going to trust you with a secret. I think you are the man to keep it. I
am going to ask you to help me in a difficult and dangerous bit of
work. I think you are the man for the job. If we succeed, I am going to
pension you handsomely for life.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Hinge.
“Walk quietly with me and listen. I am going to have a try to set that
man free. You hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I am going to ask you to help me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Will you do it?”
“If I can, sir.”
“Very good. Now when can we talk this matter over and get it ship-shape,
and see what is to be done?”
“My time's my own, sir,” Hinge answered; “and being mine, sir, it's
yours.”
I turned into the deeper recesses of the wood, and Hinge followed me.
I had resolved to trust him, and I have never been a believer in
half-confidences. I told him the errand which had brought me there. I
told him of the countess's early death, and I told him of my meeting
with her daughter and of the promise I had made to her. I set before him
the fact that, if the venture succeeded and he gave me his aid in it,
he would find wealthy friends and protectors. I told him that I was
not myself a _rich_ man, but I showed him Miss Rossano's letter and the
draft I had for a thousand pounds.
“Better send that money out of the country, sir,” he said, quietly.
“They're queer beggars, these Austrians, and they wouldn't be above
collaring the lot if we got clear of the country with our man afore
you'd got the coin out o' the bank.”
“And now, how to set about the work, Hinge?”
“You give your orders, sir, and leave 'em to me.”
“Tell me what you can. Now, how about the guards? Is the prisoner's cell
watched on all sides?”
“There's a man on stable sentry at night-time. In the day-time nobody's
on watch on my side.”
I had provided myself with a flexible-jointed saw and a small bottle of
oil, and they were packed in my knapsack now. I asked Hinge if he would
pass these to the prisoner, and he declared that he could do it easily
and without the slightest danger of discovery.
He caught eagerly at the idea, and assured me that two or three of the
iron bars which guarded the window were quite rotten at the bottom, and
could be sawn through in an hour. The day-time would be safest, and he
would undertake to be near, to cover any sound which might be made, and
give warning of any danger.
“Gettin' out o' the cell is as easy as pie, sir,” said Hinge. “That's
all right. But gettin him out o' fortress--that's another pair o' shoes
altogether!”
I thought hard for perhaps ten minutes, and then I fancied I saw my way.
Half a dozen questions cleared it. The general was away in Vienna. The
time of his return was uncertain. There were half a dozen horses under
Hinge's charge. It would surprise nobody if a message came from the
general ordering Hinge to meet him at any hour with two led horses. If
he knew when that hour would come he could have the prisoner ready in
uniform, and they could ride out together. But to do this we should need
a written order from the general, which would have to pass the officer
on duty. That order once being passed and sent on to him, Hinge would be
answerable for the rest.
This threw a dreadful difficulty in the way, but the groom was ready
with a partial help. He had received a similar order which had been
countermanded, and therefore never surrendered, as it would have been if
he had passed the gates with it. He thought he knew its whereabouts, and
he would look for it.
In effect, he found it, and found means to send it on to me. It was
scrawled in pencil from a posting place on the road to Vienna, distant
from Itzia four-and-twenty miles English, or thereabouts. I pored over
this document in my own room, and made many heart-breaking attempts to
imitate it. They were absolute failures, one and all. I had no faculty
in that direction, and my own hand stared at me from the written
page the more plainly and uncompromisingly for every effort I made to
disguise it. Apart from the utter vileness of the imitation, I did not
even clearly understand the words employed, and for aught I knew might
be giving an order which, if put into execution, would be useless for my
purpose.
I was compelled, unwillingly, to appeal to Brunow. He made light of
the business, and in less than an hour he brought me an imitation which
looked completely deceptive. He had been able, he told me, to trace the
greater part of the order on the window-pane from the original I had
given him to imitate; for the rest, to my surprise and gratitude, Brunow
volunteered. He took advantage of our next meeting with Breschia to
tell him that he was off on a three or four days' sketching expedition,
leaving me behind. He commended me to the lieutenant's friendly
hospitality with all his usual gayety of manner, and on the following
morning he rode away. The arrangement made between us was that he should
return at about ten o'clock on the following night with news of the
general's approach. The general's horses should appear to have come to
grief somehow, anyway (he guaranteed to find a plausible story),
and Brunow was to pretend to have ridden on with a message ordering
remounts. Then Hinge was to meet us at a given point, we being on foot,
and we should all make for the frontier with speed.
So long as I live I shall never forget that day or the day that followed
it. Hinge was advised of everything, and no doubt was doing all that
needed to be done, but the suspense was scarcely bearable. To saunter
about and look at those impenetrable walls, and to wonder what was going
on behind them--to invent a thousand accidents, any one of which might
wreck our plans for good and all, and to suffer in the contemplation of
each of these inventions of my own as much as I could have suffered
if it had been true, to read knowledge or suspicion in every innocent
glance that fell upon me, to fear and suspect everybody and everything,
and to keep a constant guard upon myself lest I should seem for an
instant to be anxious and preoccupied with all this weight upon me--all
this was an agony. I am not afraid to confess all this, for I have shown
more than once that I am not deficient in courage of my own kind. But
here I was a very coward, hateful and contemptible to myself.
The long day passed, and the long night, and then the real day of
waiting came. The thing that weighed upon me most of all was that while
I knew that every minute of rest and tranquillity I could snatch might
be of moment to me, rest and tranquillity were absolutely impossible.
For two whole nights I had not closed my eyes in sleep, and my brain
seemed on fire. My nerves were going, too, under this intolerable
strain, and I feared that if a crisis should arise I should lack
coolness, and plunge into some avoidable disaster.
But the day wore itself out at last, and at ten o'clock at night I was
wandering along the road by which Brunow must come, and listening with
my soul in my ears for the first distant noise of hoof-beats. The sun
had gone down in a bank of threatening cloud, and before the moon rose
the last look I had taken at the hills which hemmed us in on every side
had shown them seemingly hidden by driving mists, which travelled at an
astonishing pace, betokening a wild wind up there, while the valley lay
in a hot stillness. The light of the moon was in the sky long before she
rose above the mountains, and I could see that the wild work up there
was growing wilder every minute. The wind was descending, too, from its
lofty altitude, and I could hear it now roaring and now muttering in the
gullies like a discontented giant.
In the course of that waiting I was often mistaken in the sound of
distant hoofs. I was tricked at least a thousand times. Now it was the
wind in the trees, now it was a gurgle in the river, now it was a murmur
of life in the village, now it was the movement of a goat, a cow, or a
horse upon the hill-side. But at last I caught the real sound, and knew
it at once from all the noises which had till then deceived my fancy.
The rider came along at a good round pace, and in a while I heard Brunow
singing--a signal to me, no doubt. I called aloud “Hello! that you,
Brunow?” and he answered with a whoop, expressive of high spirits. There
was light enough to see me as he passed without drawing rein.
“I've a message from the governor to the officer in charge,” he shouted.
“Meet you at the inn by-and-by.” There was no reason why we should have
met at all, but the sense of precaution which touched me in his words
allayed my anxiety a little. If by any very improbable chance anybody
within hearing had understood him, the pretence justified itself. It
could do no harm, and it was worth while to look natural. I betook
myself at once to the point we had agreed upon for a meeting-place, and
waited there in a renewed suspense, to which all the wretchedness of
waiting I had hitherto known seemed as nothing. Suddenly the wind took
me with a great gust, which almost carried me off my feet; a clap of
thunder directly overhead seemed actually simultaneous with a piercing
glare of lightning, and the rain came down in torrents. After the flash
of lightning everything looked so impenetrably black and formless that I
might as well have stared about me with my eyes shut, but a second
flash showed me the gate of the fortress quivering in the light, and so
distinct and near that I might have believed it no more than a stone's
throw off, though I knew it to be a full mile away. In the sudden
howling of the wind and the pelting of the rain I could hear nothing,
but I kept my aching eyes fixed in the direction of the fortress, and
over and over again I saw it leap out of darkness distinct and seeming
near, but quivering as if it were built of air and shaken by a wind. The
river, which flowed quite near me, began to take a roaring and ominous
tone, and I grew anxious lest the ford we meant to attempt three or four
miles below should have become impassable by the time we reached it.
To have passed through the village would have betrayed the fact that we
were going in an opposite direction to the one proposed, and might have
excited suspicion and immediate inquiry and pursuit. While the river
growled in a more and more menacing tone beside me, I began to wish
that our arrangements could be recast. We might easily have dared the
village, trusting to a half-hour's start and the chapter of accidents,
while now the swollen ford might delay us for whole hours. The plans
could not be changed, however, and there was nothing to be done but
wait.
I was wet to the skin, and dazed by the noises of the storm, and weary
with want of sleep, but every sense of fatigue vanished when I saw, by
the glare of the lightning between me and the fortress, the recognizable
figures of Brunow and Hinge on horseback. There was a third horseman
with them, and a led horse, and for a fraction of a second I could see
them all wildly prancing and leaping together, as if the beasts were
maddened by the storm, as no doubt they were. It seemed an hour--I have
known a day seem to go by more quickly many a time--when another flash
showed them nearer, like a dark group of statuary, the horses quivering
at the glare, and the heads of the riders bent against the wind and
rain. I ran forward, not daring to call, and found them again in the
lightning and lost them again in the dark half a dozen times. When at
last we met I hailed them in a guarded tone, though it was a marvel to
me that nobody was abroad at such an hour. Brunow replied boisterously,
and I mounted in the dark, being half doubled as I did so by a kick
from one of the plunging horses. I was fortunately too near for the full
effect of the blow, but the hoof took me at the hipbone, and for the
moment paralyzed me. I had much difficulty in getting astride my own
beast, but I judged it best to say nothing of what had happened. All
sense of power had gone from my right leg, and I could get no grip upon
the saddle; but as the first sensation of numbness passed away I became
persuaded that no great hurt was done, though I was in much pain and
found a difficulty in keeping my seat.
The fear of the horses made this no easy task, for at every flash they
reared and broke away, and the ground over which we rode was difficult,
and would have been uncanny even in the daylight, so that we made slow
progress. I had travelled the way repeatedly, for this was the route by
which I had decided to travel if ever we were so lucky as to be allowed
the experiment, and I never had more reason to be thankful for my own
care and foresight.
These mountain storms are very often things of an hour, and so to-night
it proved. By the time we had reached the ford the thunder and lightning
were far away, the wind had sunk to an occasional sob and moan, the rain
had cleared, and the moon rode high in a mass of skurrying cloud, which
at times obscured her light and at times left her almost clear. But the
river was terribly swollen, and it was evident that we should not be
able to cross it for a considerable time.
So far not a word had been exchanged among us; but now that we were
compelled to pause, I turned to our companion and looked at him, in such
dim and changing light as there was, with a profound interest. He sat
with a tired stoop in his saddle, and his head was bent upon his breast.
He wore a peaked forage-cap and a large, rough, military cloak, which
effectually disguised his figure.
“This is the Conte di Rossano?” I asked, leaning towards him.
“The same, sir,” he answered, in a voice which I shall never forget. “I
know from my faithful friend here, to whom I am indebted, but I cannot
distinguish my friends as yet.”
“This is the Honorable George Brunow, sir,” I said, “and I am Captain
Fyffe, at your service.”
“Mr. Brunow,” he responded, raising his forage-cap and bowing, “Captain
Fyffe, my dear friend Corporal Hinge, I am without words to thank you.
God knows I thank you in my heart!”
His voice failed him altogether then, and we all sat silent for a time.
“What are we waiting for?” asked Brunow. “Every minute is precious. Let
us push along.”
“You see the ford,” I answered. “It may be passable in an hour, now that
the storm has ceased; but at present--”
“Great God!” cried Brunow, with a savage impatience in his tone.
“Why didn't we cross by the bridge? We could have made four times the
distance by the road!”
“It was a mistake as things have turned out,” I answered; “but we both
thought it best when we talked things over the night before last.”
“I never thought it best!” cried Brunow, fuming. “Hark! What the devil's
that?”
There was no need to call our attention to the sound, for everybody
heard it. There was no need to ask what it was, for it was impossible to
mistake it. It was the sound of a cannon from the fortress. We stared at
each other in the uncertain light.
“That's my fault, gentlemen,” said Hinge, calmly. “They've found the
stable sentry, and he's told 'em what has happened. He came up, sir,”
addressing himself to me, “just as the count was climbing out o' window.
I knocked him on the 'ead of course, but they go the rounds at midnight,
and they've come across him. Not a doubt about it.”
Just as he finished speaking another gun sounded. We were between three
and four miles away, but in the stillness of the night it seemed much
nearer.
“And with a good road under us we might by this time have been within
half a dozen miles of the frontier and safe.”
“Safe?” said Hinge. “Quite so, sir. Safe to run into the ground at the
toll-gate, sir. We're a lot better off where we are. I know Captain
Fyffe's plan, sir, and it's the best whatever happens.”
“Gentlemen,” said the count, “let us dismount and rest our horses. We
may have need of all that they can do for us.”
A third gun banged from the distant battery. The river was raging before
us. The clouds parted, and the full moon shone down with a light almost
as clear as that of day.