This had been opened with a key. The wards of the lock had shot back with a well-oiled and gentle click. He had bent his head a little as they pushed him into the living tomb—a box of stone five feet square exactly. He was nearly six feet in height; he could not stand erect; he could not stretch himself at full length. The thing was a refinement of the dreadful "little-ease" of the Tower of London and many other secular prisons where wretches were tortured for a week before their execution. He had heard of places like them, but he realised that it was not the design of those who had him fast to kill him yet. He knew that he must undergo an infinity of mental and bodily torture ere ever the scarred and trembling soul would be allowed to wing its way from the still, broken body.
He was in absolute, complete darkness, buried in a box of stone.
The rayless gloom was without any relief whatever; it was the enclosing sable of death itself; a pitchy oblivion that lay upon him like a solid weight, a thing obscene and hopeless. And the silence was a real silence, an utter stillness such as no modern man ever knows—save only the few demoniac prisoners in the cachot noir of the French convict prisons of Noumea.
Once every two days—if there indeed were such things as days and hours in this still hell—the door of the cell was noiselessly opened. There was a dim red glow in the stone corridor without, a pitcher of water, some black bread, and every now and then a few ripe figs, were pushed into the box.
Then a clang, the oily swish of the bolts, and another eternity of silence.
The man's brain did not go. It was too soon for that. He lay a fortnight—ten thousand years it seemed to him—in this box of horror.
He was not to die yet. He was not even to lose his mind; of that he was perfectly aware. He was no ordinary prisoner. No usual fate was in store for him; that also he knew. A charge of heresy in his case was absurd. No witnesses could be brought who, speaking truth, could condemn him for heresy. But what Don Perez had told him was now easily understood. He was in a place where there was no appeal, a situation with no egress.
There was not the slightest doubt in his mind that a dreadful vengeance was to be taken upon him for his treatment of the King of Spain. The Holy Office was a royal court provided with ecclesiastical weapons. Its familiars had got him in their grip; he was to die the death.
As he lay motionless day after day, night after night, in the silence—the hideous silence without light—the walls so close, pressing on him, forbidding him free movement, at every moment seeming as if they would rush together and crush him in this night of Erebus, he began to have visitors.
Sometimes a sulphurous radiance would fill the place. He would see the bowing, mocking figure of King Philip, the long yellow face looking down upon him with a malign smile. He would hear a great hoarse voice, and a little woman with a shrivelled face and covered with jewels, would squeak and gibber at him. Then, with a clank of armour, and a sudden fresh smell of the fields, Sir Henry Commendone would stand there, with a "How like you this life of the pit, Johnnie?" ... "How like you this blackness, my son?"