He went on, and found a closet to match the first on the other side of the fireplace. Then all round the room. Panels everywhere, but no means of escape, and he went again to stand at the window, to bemoan his stupidity for allowing a weak girl to make a prisoner of him in so absurd a way.
Sympathy and pity for the dwellers in the Hoze were completely gone now, and he set his teeth fast, and mentally called himself a weak idiot for ever thinking about such people. For the first few minutes he had felt something uncommonly like alarm, and had dwelt upon the consequences to himself if the smugglers found the spy upon their proceedings; but that dread had passed away in the idea that he had to do his duty, and before he could do that he must escape.
A chair or two. Then an easy-chair. A narrow table against the wall in two places. An awkwardly-shaped high-backed chair with elbows and cushions. A thick carpet in the centre. Nothing else in the room, as far as he could make out in the darkness, and if those wretched bars had only been away, how soon he could have escaped!
He went and tried to force his head through, recalling as he did that where a person’s head would go the rest of the body would pass. But there was no chance for his body there, the head would not go first.
He returned, after listening intently, unable to hear a sound, and put his ear to the key-hole of the door to listen there; but all was still, and the faint hope that the girl might be near and open to an appeal for his liberty died away.
Again he felt all about the room, to satisfy himself afresh that there was no way out, and he paused by the chimney, half disposed to essay that means of escape, but he shook his head.
“A fellow who was shut up in prison for life might do it,” he said, “but not in a case like this.”
Then, utterly wearied out, with his long and arduous twenty-four hours’ task, beginning with his watch on the cutter’s deck, he felt his way to the big chair opposite to the window to rest his legs, and try and think out some plan.
“Nobody can think well when he’s tired,” he said; and he began to run over in his mind the whole of the incidents since he landed a few hours earlier.