"'Well, one day, a fellow in a cloak, with a slouch hat over his forehead, was let in to try, as I thought, if there was anything to be got out of me, as they tried two or three times at first; some spy he was, belonging to that police devil Fouché. What did he offer me, d'ye think, after beating about the bush for half-an-hour, but the command of a French seventy-four under the Emperor, as he was by that time, and, if I would take it, I was free! On this I pretended to be thinking of it, when the police fellow sidled near me, to show a commission signed with the Emperor's name at the foot.
"'In place of taking hold of it, however, I jumped up and seized the villain's nose and chin before he saw my purpose, stuffed the parchment into his mouth by way of a gag, and made him dance round the cell, with his cloak over his head and his sword dangling alongside of him, to keep his stern clear of my foot; till the turnkey heard the noise, and he made bolt out as soon as the door was opened. You'd wonder how long that small matter served me to laugh over, for my spirit wasn't broken yet, you see; but even then, in the very midst of it, I would all of a sudden turn sick at heart, and sit wondering when the exchange of prisoners would be made that I looked for. The worst of it was, at times a horrid notion would come into my head of the French seventy-four being at sea at the moment, and me almost wishing they'd give me the offer over again—I fancied I felt the very creak of her straining in the trough of a sea, and saw the canvas of her topsails over me, standing on her poop with a glass in my hand, till she rose on a crest, and there were the Agamemnon's lighted ports bearing down to leeward upon us, till I heard Nelson's terrible voice sing out, "Give it to 'em, my lads!" when the flash of her broadside showed me his white face under the cocked hat, and it came whizzing over like a thirty-two-pound shot right into my breast, as I sunk to the bottom, and found myself awake in the prison.
"'I don't know how long it was after, but they moved me to another berth, where a man had shot himself through the head, for we actually met his body being carried along the passage; and more than that, sir, they hadn't taken the trouble to wash his brains off the wall they were scattered on. There I sat one day after another, watching the spot marked by them turn dry, guessing at everything that had gone through them as long as he was alive in the place, till my own got perfectly stupid; I was as helpless as a child, and used to cry at other times when the jailer didn't bring me my food in time. I fancied they'd forget all about me in England; and as for time, I never counted it, except by the notion I had been two or three years in.
"'At last the turnkey got so used to me, thinking me no doubt such a harmless sort of a poor man, that he would sit by and talk to me, giving accounts of the Emperor's battles and victories, and such matters. I must say I began to feel as if he was some sort of a god upon earth there was no use to strive against, just as the turnkey seemed to do, more especially when I heard of Nelson's death; so when he told me one time it wouldn't do for Fouché or the Emperor to let me out yet, I said nothing more. "Will the Emperor not let me out now?" asked I, a long time after. "Diable!" said the man, "do you think His Majesty has time to think of such a poor fellow as you, among such great matters? No, no, pauvr' homme!" continued he; "you're comfortable here, and wouldn't know what to do if you were out! No fear of your doing as your Capitaine Ourite did, since you've lived here so long, monsieur." "How long is it now, good Pierre?" asked I, with a sigh, as he was going out at the door; and the turnkey counted on his fingers. "Ulm—Austerlitz—Jena," said he slowly; "oui, oui—I scarcely thought it so much—it wants only six or seven months of ten years!" and he shut-to the door. I sprang up off the bed I was sitting on, wild at the thought—I may say, for a day or two I was mad—ten years! ten years!—and all this time where was my poor innocent Mary, and the child she expected to bear when I left Exeter—where was my old father? But I couldn't bear to dwell on it. Yes, Aldridge, by the God above, they had kept me actually ten years there, in that cursed Temple while he was going on all the time with his victories, and his shows, and his high-flown bulletins! Yet he wasn't too high, it seems, to stoop to give out, through his tools, how Wright and I had both killed ourselves for fear of bringing in the British Government—not to offer me a seventy-four in a dungeon—me, a man used to wind and water, that loved a breeze at sea like life. 'Twas the very devil's temptation, sir; but I'll tell you what, both Captain Wright and myself had been with Sir Sidney Smith at Acre, when he was baffled for the first time in his days—that was the thing, I believe from my soul, that he hated us for. I had a right to be exchanged ten times over, though he might have called Wright a spy; but what was my poor wife and her new-born baby, or my old father's gray hairs to him, and his great ambition to make everything his own—and when the very thought of me in my hole at the Temple would strike him in the midst of his victories, where he hadn't time, forsooth, to trouble himself about a poor man like me. The fact was, I could tell how he offered a British seaman, that had had a finger in nettling him, the command of one of his seventy-fours, which he had nobody fit to manage—and that in a prison where I'd be glad even of fresh air.
"''Twas then, in fact, the purpose rose firmer and firmer in me, out of the fury that was like to drive me mad, how I'd get out of his clutches, and spend my life against the very pitch of his power I knew so well about. Till that time I used to look through the bars of the window at the Seine, without ever fancying escape, low down as it was, compared with my last cell. There was a mark in the stone floor with my walking back and forward since they put me in; and by this time I had the cunning of a beast, let alone its strength, in regard of anything I took into my head; often I used to think I saw the end of my finger, or the corner of a stone, more like the way a fly sees them, than a man. The turnkey, Pierre, would never let me have a knife to eat my food with, lest I should do as he said all we English were apt to do—kill myself—which, by-the-way, is a lie; and I think that fiend of an Emperor yonder must have taught them to blame us with their own crime. However, latterly he let me have a fork for half-an-hour at dinner; and for a quarter of an hour every day, except those when he stayed to talk to me as I ate it, did I climb up and work with that fork at the top and bottom of one of the window-bars, taking care not to break the fork, and jumping down always in time to finish the meal. It took me four whole months, sir, to loosen them! Such deadly fear as I was in, too, lest he'd find it out, or lest they moved me to another cell—you'd have thought I was fond of the walls round the place, where hundreds of men before me had scrawled their last words; and the one that shot himself had written, "Liberté—anéantissement! "Liberty—annihilation!" just over where the spatter of his brains had stuck when he laid his head to the spot! If Pierre had noticed what I'd been about, my mind was made up to kill him, and then make the trial before they missed him; but that I had a horror of, after all, seeing the man had taken a sort of liking to me, and I knew he had a wife.
"'Well, at last, one day I had the thing finished; when midnight came I trembled like a leaf, till I began to fear I couldn't carry it through. I tore my shirt and the blanket in strips, to twist into a line, got out the bar by main force, squeezed through, and let myself down. The line was just long enough to let me swing against the cold wall, over a sentry's head going round the parapet below; as soon as he was past, I dropped on the edge of the wall, and fell along it, my fingers scraping the smooth stone to no purpose, till I was sliding off into the dark, with the river I didn't know how far below me, though I heard it lapping against some boats at the other side.
"'For a few moments I was quite senseless from the fall into the water. The splash roused the sentinels, and three or four bullets whizzed into it about me, as I struck out for the shore. Still the night was thick enough to help me clear off among the dark lanes in the city; and the upshot of it was that I found out some royalists, who supplied me with a pedlar's dress; till, in the end, after I can't tell you how many ticklish chances, where my luck hung upon a hair, I reached the coast, and was taken off to a British frigate. At home, sir—at home, I found I'd been given up long ago for a dead man in Bonaparte's prisons, and—and—the old man had been buried seven years, Aldridge—but not so long as my—wife. The news of my taking my own life in the Temple saved her the rest—'twas too much for her at the time, Aldridge—both she and her little one had lain in the mould nine years, when I stood looking at the grass under Exeter Cathedral. I was a young man almost, still; but my hair was as grizzled when I got out of the Temple in 1813, as you see it now, and I'll never walk the deck fairly again. Aldridge,' added the captain of the Podargus, turning round and standing still, with a low sort of a deep whisper, ''tis a strange thing, the Almighty's way of working—but I never thought—in the Temple yonder, longing for a heave of the water under me—I I little thought John Wallis would ever come to keep guard over his Majesty, the Emperor Napoleon!'
"When Captain Wallis stopped, the long send of the sea lifting the brig below us, with a wild, yearning kind of ripple from her bows back to her counter, and weltering away astern—one felt it, I may say, somewhat like an answer to him, for the breeze had begun to freshen: it had got all of a sudden nearly quite dark, too, as is the case inside the tropics, without the moon. 'Let's go on deck, gentlemen,' said the captain, coming to himself; 'now clap on those other topmost stu'nsails, Mr Aldridge, and make her walk, sir'—'No saying,' I heard him mutter, as he let us go up before him—'no saying what the want of the Podargus might do, off the island, these dark nights—with water alongside, one can't be sure. I warrant me if that man's dreams came true, as mine did, he would be at the head of his thousands again, ruining the whole world, with men rotting out of sight in dungeons while the wind blows! Ay, dreams, young gentleman!' said he to me as we stood on deck; 'I'll never get rid of that prison, in my head, nor the way that dead man's brain seemed to come into mine, off the wall! But for my part, off St Helena, 'tis Napoleon Bonaparte's dreams that enter into my head. If you'll believe it, sir, I've heard them as it were creeping and tingling round the black heights of the island at dead of night, like men in millions ready to break out in war-music, as I used to hear them go over the bridge near the Temple—or in shrieks and groans; we all the time forging slowly ahead, and the surf breaking in at the foot of the rocks. I know then who's asleep at the time up in Longwood!'
"The brig-of-war was taking long sweeps and plunges before the wind; the Southern Cross right away on her larboard quarter, and the very same stars spread all out aloft, that I watched a couple of nights before, close by Violet Hyde. The whole of what I'd just heard was nothing to me in a single minute, matched with the notion of never seeing her more. Everything I'd thought of since we left England was gone, even one's heart for the service; and what to do now, I didn't know. I scarce noticed it commence to rain, till a bit of a squall had come on, and they were hauling down stu'nsails: the dark swells only to be seen rising with the foam on them, and a heavier cover of dull cloud risen off the brig's beam, as well as ahead; so that you merely saw her canvas lift before you against the thick of the sky, and dive into it again. 'Twas just cleared pretty bright off the stars astern of us, however, wind rather lighter than before the squall, when the captain thought he made out a sail near about the starboard beam, where the clouds came on the water-line; a minute or two after she was plain enough in the clear, though looming nearly end-on, so that one couldn't well know her rig. Thinking at first sight it might be the schooner, Captain Wallis was for bracing up, to stand in chase and overhaul her; but shortly after she seemed either to yaw a little, or fall off again before the wind like ourselves, at any rate showing three sticks on the horizon, with square canvas spread, and evidently a small ship.
"'Some homeward-bound craft meaning to touch at the island,' said Captain Wallis, telling the first lieutenant to keep all fast; by which time she was lost in the dusk again, and I wasn't long of going below. A fancy had got hold of me for the moment, I can't deny, of its being the Seringapatam after us on Westwood's owning himself; whereupon I persuaded myself Captain Wallis might perhaps take the risk on him of letting us both go. For my part, I felt by this time as if I'd rather be in the same ship with her, hopeless though it was, than steer this way for the other side of the line; and I went down with a chill at my heart like the air about an iceberg.