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.