The porter, with circumstantial particularity, re-enacts his attempt to remove the damning black box and his encounter with my hapless companion. The mayor publicly embraces him. The chief of the gendarmes proves by actual demonstration that the German captain's uniform is a perfect fit for Zeno the Great. The mayor kisses him on both cheeks. The commanding officer of the military squad makes the discovery that the six cannon balls are but thin hollow metal shells containing cavities or recesses, into which presumably fulminating explosives might be introduced. The mayor kisses him on both cheeks and on the forehead.
It is one's own turn; at the prospect one involuntarily shudders! One's self is hedged about by impassioned inquisitionists. On every side one is confronted by waving beards, condemning eyes, denouncing faces, clenched hands and pointing fingers. From full twenty throats at once one is beset by shrill interrogations; but, owing to the universal rapidity of utterance and the shrillness of enunciation, one is quite unable, in the present state of one's mind, to distinguish a single intelligible syllable.
Lacking my translating manual to aid me in framing suitable responses, I had resort to an expedient which at the moment seemed little short of an inspiration, but which I have since ascertained to have been technically an error, inasmuch as thereby I was put in the attitude of pleading guilty to being a spy in the employ of the enemy, of being an accomplice of Zeno the Great in nefarious plots against the lives and property of the French people, and of having conspired with him to wreck all public and many private edifices in the town by means of deadly agencies.
The mistake I made, Mr. President, was this: To all questions of whatsoever nature, I answered by saying, "Oui, oui."
Almost instantaneously—so it seemed—I found myself transported to a place of durance vile, deep down in the intricate confines of the noisome cellars beneath the building where the inquisition had taken place. There in lonely solitude did I languish; and at intervals I heard through the thick walls, from the adjoining keep, the dismal, despairing accents of my ill-starred fellow countryman bewailingly uplifted. True, he had wilfully deceived me. Most certainly he told me those cannon balls were solid iron.
Yet this was neither the time nor the place for vain recriminations; for, indeed, all seemed lost. Doom impended—earthly destruction; mundane annihilation! One pictured a gallows tree; and, turning from that image, one pictured a firing squad at sunrise. I was only deterred from committing to writing my expiring message to Mr. Bryan and the world at large by two insurmountable considerations: One was that I had no writing materials of whatsoever nature, and the other was that my mental perturbation precluded all possibility of inducing a consecutive and lucid train of thought.
Constantly there recurred to me the words of a popular yet melancholy ballad I had once heard reproduced on a talking machine which dealt with the tragic and untimely fate of a noble youth who, through misapprehension and no discernible fault of his own, perished at the hands of a drum-head court-martial in time of hostilities, the refrain being: "The pardon came too late!"
Nevermore should I see my peaceful study at Fernbridge Seminary for Young Ladies, with its cozy armchair, its comforting stool, or rest, for the slippered feet, its neatly arranged tea table! Nevermore should I spend the tranquil evening hours with Wordsworth and with Tennyson! Nevermore should my eyes rest on my portfolio of pressed autumn leaves, my carefully preserved wild flowers, my complete collection of the flora of Western New Jersey!
In such despairing contemplations very many hours passed—or at least, so I believed at the time. Eventually footsteps sounded without in the paved corridor; the lock of my cell turned; the hinges grated; metal clanged. Had another day dawned? Had the executioners come to lead me forth? Nay; not so! The sickly light that streamed into my dungeon cell was not the beaming of another sunrise but the suffused radiance of the present afternoon; in fact, the hour was approximately one o'clock P. M., as I learned later.
Enframed in the door opening stood the form of my gaoler, and beside him was one of the cousins of my charge, Miss Canbee. It was the tall brunette cousin—not the slight blonde one. I was saved! I was saved!