“Could I do it!” cried Bigley. “Why, sir, we did get one up to the top without any proper things. I can dive.”
“Yes, he can dive, father,” I said eagerly. “You need not be afraid about that.”
My father looked at us both, and grew very silent, as we trudged on, to reach the cottage at last utterly tired; and though Bigley proposed that we should go on and see whether the buoy we had left was all right, my father said that it might very well wait till morning, and Bigley stayed for the night.
“I thought your father would have been ever so much more eager and excited about it,” said Bigley, speaking to me from the inner room where he slept, the door having been left open.
“He is excited,” I said in a low voice, for across the passage I could hear him walking up and down in his own room; and that kept on till I dropped off asleep, and dreamed that the French had landed with four large boats and a great pole which they lowered down into the sea. Then they seemed to have got me fastened to the rope that ran through the wheel-block at the head, and they had fastened a pig of lead on to my chest, which pressed upon me as they hauled me up out of the boat, and then let go.
It was all wonderfully real. I felt myself suspended over the water, which looked black as ink instead of lit up by the sun as it was when Bigley went down. And as I hung there, the oppression from the pig of lead was terrible, and it seemed to please Captain Gualtière, who was there in a boat opposite, giving orders and laughing at my struggles to escape. “Now,” I heard him say in his Frenchy English, “cease to hold ze ropes, and laissez let him go.”
Then there was a dull splash, and with the weight always upon me I seemed to part the waters and go down, down, down, into the deep black depths, which appeared to have no bottom. There was a growing sensation of suffocation; my boots hurt my feet, and the blister I had made upon my heel smarted, and all at once the pony, as it stood at the half-way house door, kicked out at me, just as I was beginning to suffocate; and this broke the rope, and I shot up to the surface.
In other words, I started up awake, to find that I had been lying on my back, that I was bathed in perspiration, and that my father was still walking up and down his bed-room.
“What stuff to go and dream!” I said to myself, as I felt very much relieved. “That comes of eating cold beef and pickled cucumber for supper.”
I turned upon my side to settle myself off to sleep again; but I could not doze off; and do what I would, the thought of being sent down into the black water with a pig of our lead upon my chest, and the pony down below ready to kick out at me kept haunting my mind, while across the passage there was my father still keeping up the regular tramp.