Burgo's Romance

by T. W. Speight

IN DURANCE VILE.

It was daylight when Burgo next opened his eyes, and asked himself what had happened to him and where he was. He tried to satisfy himself on the latter point first, because not to have done so would have involved an effort of memory such as just then he scarcely felt equal to. So without attempting to move hand or foot, he proceeded to stare about him, his eyes wandering from side to side, and taking in one detail after another of the unfamiliar quarters in which he now found himself.

Imprimis, he was stretched at full length on a couch which he afterwards found to be made of mahogany, with old-fashioned cushions and a pillow of horsehair considerably the worse for wear. The only other furniture comprised a small octagonal table, and a couple of straight-backed chairs of unpolished oak, apparently of some antiquity. Stay, though; in one corner was placed a common washstand and toilet service, such as in middle-class households are reserved for servants' cubicles. The room itself was neither very large nor very lofty, but it was undeniably bare-looking, walls and ceiling being alike washed a dull creamy white. The room was lighted by one long, narrow window, with leaded lozenge-shaped panes of thick greenish glass, but placed so high up in the wall that a man had need to be full six feet high for his eyes to be on a level with its lowest panes. As the room had but one window, so it had but one door, which, like the table and the chairs, seemed to be of substantial oak.

But although he had satisfied himself as to the kind of place in which he was, that did not help him to solve the question of where he was. His ears were filled with a long, low, murmurous wash, which now struck his consciousness for the first time. He at once recognised it for what it was. "It is the noise of the incoming tide," he said to himself. "And this place? Is it--can it be that I have been brought to the Wizard's Tower?"

Everything was clear to him now, without any mental groping backward, up to the moment when he was struck down as he stood by the edge of the plantation. He had been the object of a foul and cowardly attack, and it was not difficult to guess to whose instigation he owed it. More than ever did he realise at that moment with how resolute and unscrupulous an antagonist he had to deal.

But why was he lying there? At once he sprang to his feet, but as he did so an involuntary "Ah!" escaped him, and the same instant he clapped both his hands to the back of his head. He had not known till then that he was wounded. But with the change in his position the pain made itself sharply felt, and presently his fingers informed him that the hair round the wound had been cut away, and the place itself covered with strips of sticking-plaster. To such an extent had he been tended and cared for. Just then, however, his wound was a matter of quite secondary importance. Having, as he believed, rightly guessed to what place he had been conveyed while unconscious, the all-important question at once put itself to him: "Am I a prisoner?"

His heart foreboded the answer but too surely. He crossed to the door and turned the handle. It was enough.

While he stood staring at the door like a man half dazed, he noticed that in the upper half of it there was a panel, about a couple of feet square, which looked as if it were movable, and on trying it with his hand he found that it slid back in a groove, leaving an aperture of its own size, of which Burgo at once proceeded to avail himself as a peep-hole. But what he could discern through it scarcely repaid him for his trouble--merely another space of whitewashed wall, as it might be that of a landing, with the two topmost steps of a flight of stone stairs leading to unknown regions below. Then it struck Burgo that the aperture might perchance be available for another purpose. Putting one arm through it up to the shoulder he proceeded to search for the bolt or key which held him prisoner, but neither one nor the other could he find. Whoever had locked him in had been careful to remove the key. Well, he had hardly expected anything else.

He now bethought himself to look at his watch. It was close on seven o'clock. It had been somewhere about ten o'clock when he was struck down, so that his unconsciousness had lasted for nearly nine hours. No wonder that his head smarted as it did.

It was not till later, when he had ample leisure for thinking things over, that there seemed to come over him a sort of dim consciousness that in the course of the night something had been given him to swallow, and that in his ears there had been a faint, confused murmur of voices, as of people talking a long way off; but it had all been so vague and unreal that he could never feel sure it was aught but a dream.