There was no mistake about it. He was wide awake now, and it was years ago that he used to listen to the birds in his old bedroom at Sir Henry Norland’s; and though a thrush was whistling away outside, and the rising sun was streaming in at a window and shining on the opposite wall, where he was now Hilary Leigh did not know, only that he was seated on a heap of straw, and that he was in what looked like a part of an old-fashioned chapel, with a window high up above his reach.
“I feel as if I had been asleep for about a week,” muttered Hilary, “and I’m so hungry that if they, whoever they are, don’t soon bring me some breakfast I shall eat my boots.”
“Why, they must have carried me in here while I was asleep,” he thought; and then, “Hallo, old fellow!” he cried, laughing, “there you are, are you?”
For just then, completely eclipsing the thrush in power, a donkey—probably, he thought, the one that brought him there—trumpeted forth his own resonant song, the song that made the savage Irishman exclaim that it was “a wonderful bird for singing, only it seemed to have a moighty cowld.” And if there had been any doubt before what donkey it was, Hilary’s mind was set at rest, for as the bray ended in a long-drawn minor howl there came two or three sharp raps, just as if the jackass has relieved his feelings with these good kicks, as was the case, up against the boards of the shed in which he was confined.
“Well, this is a rum set-out,” said Hilary, getting up, and then bending down to have a rub at his legs, which still suffered from the compression of the cord. “Hang it all! what a mess my uniform is in with this chaffy straw!”
He set to and brushed off as much as he could, and then began to inspect the place in which he was imprisoned, to find that the ideas he had formed of it in the dark were not far wrong, inasmuch as there was a plastered wall, a stone floor, an ancient-looking door with a big keyhole, through which he could see nothing, and the Gothic window with iron bars across, and no glass to keep out the air.
“Well, if any fellow had told me about this I should have said he was inventing. I suppose I’m a prisoner. I wonder what Lipscombe thinks of my not coming back. Well, I can’t help it; and he must come with some of our men to cut me out.”
“Come to tea, Jack! Come to tea, Jack! Whips Kitty! Whips Kitty! Whips Kitty!”
“Yes, I’ll come to tea,” said Hilary, as the thrush sang on; “but how am I to come? Oh! I say, I am so precious hungry. I could eat the hardest biscuit and the toughest bit of salt beef that ever a fellow put between his teeth. They might bring me some prog.”
Hilary was well rested by his sleep, and felt as active as a young goat now, so running to the door he tried it again, to find it shut fast, and no chance of getting it open. So he turned at once to the window, and looked around for something to enable him to reach it, but looked in vain, for there was nothing to be seen.