‘Of one who gave a shining doubloon to tell you so much; and he bade me add, too, that you should hold yourself in readiness for a quick journey.’
‘But, tell me,’ I interrupted—when we heard the voice of the provost-marshal without, calling, ‘Lazarillo, Lazarillo, what keeps you?’ The turnkey made but one bound of it to the door, locked the cell with a clash, and hurried away, leaving me with an aching hand, but a palpitating and a very grateful heart. All was not yet over with me. I had still a right to the rays of the sun. The black grave, which in my mind I had seen for the last hour continually yawning before me, was gone. Most blessed of the moods of the heart, Hope, slid again into my being, and sent the hot blood dancing madly through my veins. I paced up and down the cell wildly. I tried to leap at the barred window. The pain of my lacerated flesh I remembered no more; and clenching both fists, I vowed that, once without these walls, it was only a dead body which the Spaniards would bring back. The roar of the conflict in the harbour, which still continued, worked me up to the highest pitch of excitement. I sought to distinguish, in fancy, between the guns of our enemies and those of my friends; and every time I heard the sharp ring of the smaller metal, which I concluded was fired from aboard the schooner, I broke out in rhapsodies, calling upon the ball to fly truly home to its mark, and to hit that pestilent alcaide or his ferret-eyed clerk. At length I began to cool down, and get somewhat ashamed of my fervour. Besides, the noise of cannonading abated—the reports of the guns coming fainter and fainter, as if the fight were being carried on more to seaward. From this I judged that the schooner had been beaten off. Indeed, I could expect no other termination of the attack, which, when I came to think of it in sober earnest, appeared to me to be little short of madness, and I wondered how Stout Jem had come to attempt it. From these matters I began to think more reasonably of my own situation. I little doubted but that my unknown friend was no other than Don José, who appeared to my mind to be as singular a mixture of base and generous; qualities as a man could be composed of. But how was he to help me? Was the mode of escape to be by force or escalade? To cut the window-bars would require a file, and to mount to them a ladder. Then, my left hand was in a bad condition for either working or clambering, and even should I succeed in making my way into the city, whither was I to go next? I had no place of refuge, but the woods, and without arms or ammunition, little hope of aught but a lingering death there, either by starvation or wild Indians. Indeed, the more I mused, the more gloomy after all my prospects seemed.
The excitement at the first notion of escape thus passed away. My wounded hand, although not altogether disabled, was very stiff and painful, and I had not even the means of washing away the clotted blood. So, sitting, in no merry mood, pondering, upon my bench, the slow hot hours crept by. The sunlight came in a fiery stream where the blue moonbeam had lain the night before. The buzz of insects and the rustling of rich foliage, waved by the fresh sea-breeze, sounded cheerily from without, and sometimes a puff, stronger than common, would find its way into the hot cell, and play round my cheeks and nostrils, bringing with it the cool, fresh savour of the ocean.
It might have been about one o’clock, when the friendly turnkey unlocked the door and entered, carrying with him a very fair dinner of meat and roasted plantains, to which was added a small measure of generous Spanish wine. I entreated him, all in a breath, to give me more information touching my projected escape, and also as respected the fate of the schooner. In regard to the latter affair, the man said, he believed that the attack had only been a sort of a feint, or bravado, and that, after some cannonading, a boat with a white flag had put off from the schooner, which had thereupon ceased firing; but the Spaniards not being willing to come to any truce with pirates and sea-robbers, as they called us, had continued to fire upon the boat, and a ball breaking the oars on one side, and very narrowly missing the boat herself, those in her pulled round and back to the schooner. A small squadron of armadilloes then got under weigh, and the schooner had nothing else for it than to stand out to sea, the armadilloes following her, and both exchanging long shots at each other. This I afterwards understood to be a very fair account of the enterprise, which was indeed undertaken only in the hope of wresting me out of the Spaniards’ hands. But I had other friends at work, as the reader will see. The turnkey, who was, or rather pretended to be, in some agitation at the thought of the work which he had been bribed to undertake, now told me that about two o’clock, at the hour when most of the inhabitants of Carthagena are in use to take their siesta, or day-sleep he would be with me again.
‘You may be thankful,’ quoth he, ‘that you were not taken as prisoner to the fort, where, indeed, there would be little chance of escape, let you have what friends you might; but this is not a regular prison, being only a sort of guardhouse, attached to the alcaide’s mansion, for the convenience of keeping accused persons for examination. Therefore, once out of your cell, and furnished with the pass-word, you will have little ado in making your flight to the woods, where you must shift for yourself—he who has paid me to peril my place in the matter having no refuge to offer you.’
The reader may be sure that I exhausted myself in compliments and thanks to my benefactor, whom the jailer obstinately refused to name, but about whom there was in my mind no doubt whatever. Neither was I in any great surprise, when I came attentively to consider the state of matters, at the mode in which the affair was to be arranged, and the easy compliance for some trifling bribe of the jailer. I called to mind how often I had been told that, in almost all Spanish prisons in the Indies, the jailers and magistrates were just as great rogues as the thieves they dealt with. Nay, I had no doubt but that the alcaide himself would have taken a bribe to let me go, as readily as the turnkey, only he would have been very like to break his engagement, and hang me after all; thus gratifying himself in both ways. As it was, I considered that my chances were very good. The turnkey did not at all seem to apprehend any interruption from his comrades. ‘We live in very good intelligence,’ quoth he; ‘and none of us cares to spoil the other’s game. There is but one man I dread, and he, I hope, is out of the way. Curses on that sharp-eyed clerk of the alcaide’s, he takes a pleasure in marring the best-laid schemes.’
But I swore within myself, that were I interrupted by this official, he would have small chance of ever looking out of his ferret-eyes again. I think the jailer understood what was passing in my mind, although I spoke not, for he smiled meaningly, as he said, peering into my face, with a curious expression on his own—
‘And this clerk is but a weak slip of a man after all. I warrant you a stout fellow would smash his brittle bones as easily as I would so many pipe-stems. However, that is no business of mine. In half an hour, Señor the Buccaneer, all will be ready.’