CHAPTER XXI
THE KEY
Colonel John rose and walked unsteadily to the window. He rested a hand on either jamb and looked through it, peering to right and left with wistful eyes. He detected no one, nothing, no change, no movement, and, with a groan, he straightened himself. But he still continued to look out, gazing at the bare sward below the window, at the sparkling sheet of water beyond and beneath it, at the pitiless blue sky above, in which the sun was still high, though it had begun to decline.
Presently he grew weary, and went back to his chair. He sat down with his elbows on his knees and his head between his hands. Again his ears had deceived him! Again hope had told her flattering tale! How many more times would he start to his feet, fancying he heard the footstep that did not fall, calling aloud to those who were not there, anticipating those who, more hard of heart than the stone walls about him, more heedless than the pitiless face of nature without, would not come before the appointed time! And that was hours away, hours of thirst and hunger, almost intolerable; of patience and waiting, weary waiting, broken only by such a fancy, born of his weakened senses, as had just drawn him to the window.
The suffering which is inevitable is more easy to bear than that which is caused by man. In the latter case the sense that the misery felt may be ended by so small a thing as another's will; that another may, by lifting a finger, cut it short, and will not; that to persuade him is all that is needful—this becomes at the last maddening, intolerable, a thing to upset the reason, if that other will not be persuaded.
Colonel John was a man sane and well-balanced, and assuredly not one to despair lightly. But even he had succumbed more than once during the last twelve hours to gusts of rage, provoked as much by the futility of his suffering as by the cruelty of his persecutors. After each of these storms he had laughed, in wonder at himself, had scolded himself and grown calm. But they had made their mark upon him, they had left his eyes wilder, his cheeks more hollow; his hand less firm.
He had burned, in fighting the cold of the past night, all that would burn, except the chair on which he sat; and with the dawn the last spark of his fire had died out. Notwithstanding those fits of rage he was not light-headed. He could command his faculties at will, he could still reflect and plan, marshal the arguments and perfect the reasons that must convince his foes, that, if they inflicted a lingering death on him, they did but work their own undoing. But at times he found himself confounding the present with the past, fancying, for a while, that he was in a Turkish prison, and turning, under that impression, to address Bale; or starting from a waking dream of some cold camp in Russian snows—alas! starting from it only to shiver with that penetrating, heart-piercing, frightful cold, which was worse to bear than the gnawing of hunger or the longing of thirst.
He had not eaten for more than seventy hours. But the long privation which had weakened his limbs and blanched his cheeks, which had even gone some way towards disordering his senses, had not availed to shake his will. The possibility of surrender did not occur to him, partly because he felt sure that James McMurrough would not be so foolish as to let him die; but partly, also, by reason of a noble stubbornness in the man, a fixedness that for no pain of death would leave a woman or a child to perish. More than once Colonel Sullivan had had to make that choice, amid the horrors of a retreat across famished lands, with wolves and Cossacks on his skirts; and perhaps the choice then made had become a habit of the mind. At any rate, whether that were the cause or no, in this new phase he gave no thought to yielding.
He had sat for some minutes in the attitude of depression, or bodily weakness, which has, been described, when once more a sound startled him. He raised his head and turned his eyes, sharpened by hunger, on the window. But this time, distrusting his senses, he did not rise until the sound was repeated. Then he faltered to his feet, and once again went unsteadily to the window, and, leaning a hand on each jamb, looked out.
At the same moment Flavia looked in. Their eyes met. Their faces were less than a yard apart.