“Bah!” cried my fellow; “I have not looked. He is a bone of Cabochon’s picking.”
* * * * * * *
With what a conflict of emotions I set to work—tentatively at first; then, seeing how noiselessly the file ran in its oiled groove, with a concentration of vigour—upon the bars of my window, it is not difficult to imagine. So hard I wrought that for hours I scarce gave heed to my growling hunger or attention to my surroundings. As to the latter, indeed, I was by this time sensibly inured to the conditions of confinement, and found little in my cell when I came to examine it to distinguish it from others I had inhabited. A bench, a pitcher, a flattened mess of straw; here and there about the stone flags marks as if some frantic beast had sought to undermine himself a passage to freedom; here and there, engraved with a nail or the tooth of a comb on the plaster coating of the walls, ciphers, initials, passionate appeals to heaven or blasphemous indecencies unnameable; in one spot a forlorn cry: “Liberté, quand cesseras-tu d’être un vain mot!” in another, in feminine characters, the poor little utterance: “On nous dit que nous sortirons demain,” made so pathetic by the later supplement underscored, “Vain espoir!”—with all these, or their like, was I grievously familiar—resigned, not hardened to them, I am sure.
The window at which I stood looked across a little-frequented passage—the Puit d’Ermite—upon a blank wall; and was terminated with a pretty broad sill of stone that screened my operations from casual wayfarers in the street below. Once, peering forth as I could, with my face pressed to the bars, I found myself to be situated so indifferent high as that, free of the grate, I might drop to the pavement without incurring risk of severer damage than a fractured leg or ankle, perhaps. Obviously, every point had been considered in this trifling matter of my escape. By whom? By him that had put me that pawn up my sleeve in the Palais de Justice? Well, the pawn had checked the king, it appeared; and now it must content me to continue the game with a handkerchief over my eyes, like the great M. Philidor.
By two o’clock, having cut through a couple of the bars close by their junction with the sill, so that a vigorous pull at both would open a passage for me large enough to squeeze through, I was absorbed in the careful process of cementing and concealing the evidences of my work when I heard a sound behind me and twisted myself about with a choke of terror. But it was my friendly jailer, come with a trencher of broken scraps for the famished animal in the cage.
“Corps de Christ!” he muttered, his face white and scared—“but here is an admirable precaution! What if I had been Fouquier-Tinville himself, then?”
“You made no noise.”
“Par exemple! I can shoot a hundredweight of bolts, it seems, so as not to wake a weasel. I made no noise to deaf ears. But, for thyself, monsieur—He that would steal corn must be careful his sack has no holes in it. And now I’ll wager thou’st dusted thy glittering filings out into the sunbeams, and a sentry, with pistols and a long musket, pacing the cobbles down there!”
“Soyez tranquille! I have all here in my pocket.”
He put down the platter, shrugged his shoulders, and came on tiptoe to the window.