"And so you failed, Renny," he said.
"Ah, your honour, those satanic English turnkeys! With a Frenchman, the job had been done; but it is a bad thing to be in prison in England. His honour can vouch I have some brains. I had made plans—a hundred plans, but there was ever something that did not work. The captain, he too, was eager, as your honour can imagine. My faith, we thought and we thought, and we schemed and contrived, and in the end, there was only one thing to complete our plot—to bribe the jailer. Would your honour believe—it was only that one little difficulty. My Lady had given me a hundred guineas, I had enough money, your honour sees. But the man—I had smoked with him, drunk with him, ay, and made him drunk too, and I thought all was going well, but when I hinted to him what we wanted—Ah! he was a brute—I tell you I had hard work to escape the prison myself, and only for my leaving him with some of the money, I should now be pinched there too. I hardly dare show my face in the place any more. And my poor Lady builds on the hope, and Mr. the Captain—I had to tell him, he took it like an angel. Ah, the poor gentleman! He looked at me so brave and kind! 'I am as grateful, my poor friend, as if you had done it,' said he, 'and perhaps it is all for the best.' All for the best—ah, your honour!"
René fairly broke down here, and wept on his sleeve. But Sir Adrian's eyes, circled and worn with watching and thought, shone dry with a far deeper grief, as, a few moments later, he passed along the street towards the walls of the castle.
There was in those days little difficulty in obtaining admission to a condemned prisoner; and, in the rear of the red-headed, good-tempered looking jailer—the same, he surmised, whose sternness in duty had baffled the Breton's simple wiles—he stepped out of the sweet morning sunshine into the long stone passages. The first tainted breath of the prison brought a chill to his blood and oppression to his lungs, and the gloom of the place enveloped him like a pall.
With a rattle of keys a door dismally creaking on its hinges was swung back at last, and the visitor was ushered into the narrow cell, dark for all its whitewashed walls, where Captain Jack was spending his last hours upon earth. The hinges groaned again, the door slammed, and the key once more grated in the lock. Sir Adrian was alone with his friend.
For a moment there was silence; the contraction of the elder man's heart had brought a giddiness to his brain, a dimness of his eyes, through which he was ill able to distinguish anything.
But then there was a clank of fetters—ah, what a sound to connect with lucky Jack Smith, the gayest, freest, and most buoyant of men! And a voice cried:
"Adrian!"
It had a joyful ring, well-nigh the old hearty tones. It struck Adrian to the soul.