[Chapter 12]: In which our hero is offered freedom at the price of honor; and Mr. Diggle finds that others can quote Latin on occasion.
Next morning, when Desmond left the shed with his fellow prisoners, he took with him, secreted in a fold of his dhoti, a small piece of clay. It had been given him overnight by the Babu. An hour or two later, happening to be for a moment alone in the tool shop, he took out the clay and examined it carefully. It was a moment for which he had waited and longed with feverish impatience. The clay was a thin strip, oval in shape, and slightly curved. In the middle of it was the impression, faint but clear, of a key. A footstep approaching, he concealed the clay again in his garment, and, when a workman entered, was busily plying a chisel upon a deal plank.
Before he left the tool shop, he secreted with the clay a scrap of steel and a small file. That day, and for several days after, whenever chance gave him a minute or two apart from his fellow workmen, he employed the precious moments in diligently filing the steel to the pattern on the clay. It was slow work: all too tedious for his eager thought. But he worked at his secret task with unfailing patience, and at the week's end had filed the steel to the likeness of the wards of a key.
That night, when his "co-mates in exile" were asleep, he gently inserted the steel in the lock of his ankle band. He tried to turn it. It stuck fast; the wards did not fit. He was not surprised. Before he made the experiment he had felt that it would fail; the key was indeed a clumsy, ill-shapen instrument. But next day he began to work on another piece of steel, and on this he spent every spare minute he could snatch. This time he found himself able to work faster. Night and morning he looked searchingly at the key on the warder's bunch, and afterward tried to cut the steel to the pattern that was now, as it were, stamped upon his brain.
He wished he could test his second model in the morning light before the warder came, and correct it then. But to do so would involve discovery by his fellow captives; the time to take them into his confidence was not yet. He had perforce to wait till dead of night before he could tell whether the changes, more and more delicate and minute, made upon his key during the day were effective. And the Babu was fretful; having done his part admirably, as Desmond told him, in working the key into his story, he seemed to expect that the rest would be easy, and did not make account of the long labor of the file.
At length a night came when, inserting the key in the lock, Desmond felt it turn easily. Success at last! As he heard the click, he felt an extraordinary sense of elation. Quietly unclasping the fetter, he removed it from his ankle, and stood free. If it could be called free--to be shut up in a locked and barred shed in the heart of one of the strongest fortresses in Hindostan! But at least his limbs were at liberty. What a world of difference there was between that and his former state!
Should he inform the Babu? He felt tempted to do so, for it was to Surendra Nath's ingenuity in interpolating the incident of the key into a well-known story that he owed the clay pattern of the warder's key. But Surendra Nath was excitable; he was quite capable of uttering a yell of delight that would waken the other men and force a premature disclosure. Desmond decided to wait for a quiet moment next day before telling the Babu of his success. So he replaced his ankle band, locked the catch, and lay down to the soundest and most refreshing sleep he had enjoyed for many a night.
He had only just reached the workshop next morning when a peon came with a message that Angria Rho {a chief or prince} required his instant attendance at the palace. He began to quake in spite of himself. Could the prince have discovered already that the lock of his fetters had been tampered with? Desmond could scarcely believe it. He had made his first test in complete darkness; nothing had broken the silence save the one momentary click; and the warder, when he unloosed him, had not examined the lock. What if he were searched and the precious key were found upon him? It was carefully hidden in a fold of his dhoti. There was no opportunity of finding another hiding place for it; he must go as he was and trust that suspicion had not been aroused. But it was with a galloping pulse that he followed the peon out of the dockyard, within the walls of the fort, and into the hall where he had had his first interview with the Pirate.
His uneasiness was hardly allayed when he saw that Angria was in company with Diggle. Both were squatting on the carpeted dais; no other person was in the room. Having ushered him in, the peon withdrew, and Desmond was alone with the two men he had most cause to fear. Diggle was smiling, Angria's eyes were gleaming, his mobile lips working as with impatience, if not anxiety.
The Pirate spoke quickly, imperiously.