The rope which encircled his neck had been run through a ring in the opposite wall just above one of the windows. Beaumagnan who was acting with jerky movements and apparently half mad, opened that window and half opened the shutter that opened outwards. Then, using the ring as a pulley-block, he pulled the rope and compelled Ralph to walk across the room. Ralph saw through the half-opened shutters the empty space, which, from the top of the steep slope on which the lighthouse had been built, fell among sloping boulders and great trunks of trees whose leafy tops shut out the horizon.
Beaumagnan twisted him round, set his back against the shutters, and tied him to them by the wrists and ankles. Ralph was now in this predicament: in the case of his trying to move forward, the rope round his neck, tightening through the slip-knot would strangle him; if on the other hand the whim took Beaumagnan to get rid of his victim, he had only to give him a sharp push, the shutters would give way and Ralph, dangling over the abyss, would find himself being hanged.
“An excellent position for a serious conversation,” he sneered.
Moreover his mind was made up. If it was Beaumagnan’s intention to give him the choice between death and divulging the steps that he, Ralph, had been able to make towards a solution of the problem, he would speak without the slightest hesitation.
“I’m at your orders,” he said. “Ask away.”
“Be quiet!” snapped Beaumagnan, in raging accents.
He stuck a pad of cotton wool over Ralph’s mouth and fastened it in place by a handkerchief tied round his head.
“A single sound—a single movement—and with one blow of my fist I’ll knock you into the abyss!” he snarled.
He looked at him for a moment as if he were asking himself whether he had not better do it at once and be done with it.
But of a sudden he left him, crossed the room on tiptoe and stretching himself at full length on the threshold, looked through the door which was a little way open.