Black Humbert, taper in hand, approached the bed. Herman remained near the door. Now, with the candle near, the bed revealed a man lying on it, and tied with knotted ropes; a young man, with sunken cheeks and weary, desperate eyes. Beside him, on a chair, were the fragments of a meal, a bit of broken bread, some cold soup, on which grease had formed a firm coating.
Lying there, sleeping and waking and sleeping again, young Haeckel, one time of His Majesty’s secret service and student in the University, had lost track of the days. He knew not how long he had been a prisoner, except that it had been eternities. Twice a day, morning and evening, came his jailer and loosened his bonds, brought food, of a sort, and allowed him, not out of mercy, but because it was the Committee’s pleasure that for a time he should live, to move about the room and bring the blood again to his numbed limbs.
He was to live because he knew many things which the Committee would know. But, as the concierge daily reminded him, there was a limit to mercy and to patience.
In the mean time they held him, a hostage against certain contingencies. Held him and kept him barely alive. Already he tottered about the room when his bonds were removed; but his eyes did not falter, or his courage. Those whom he had served so well, he felt, would not forget him. And meanwhile, knowing what he knew, he would die before he became the tool of these workers in the dark.
So he lay and thought, and slept when thinking became unbearable, and thus went his days and the long nights.
The concierge untied him, and stood back. “Now,” he said.
But the boy—he was no more—lay still. He made one effort to rise, and fell back.
“Up with you!” said the concierge, and jerked him to his feet. He caught the rail of the bed, or he would have fallen. “Now—stand like a man.”
He stood then, facing his captors without defiance. He had worn all that out in the first days of his imprisonment. He was in shirt and trousers only, his feet bare, his face unshaven—the thin first beard of early manhood.
“Well?” he said at last. “I thought—you’ve been here once to-night.”