He flung himself upon the ground, hid his face on his crossed arms, and gave himself over to despair.
Would he never leave this awful place? Was this the way in which his prayers and his mother’s prayers were to be answered? If so, what was the use of praying? He would give it all up. He would never pray again. It was no use. Nothing was of any use.
Hours passed in one long agony. All that day he was left alone. At nightfall a gendarme brought him his allowance of coarse food, and left him again. Roy drank the water, and pushed the rest aside, too sick with misery to care to eat. The boys would now be escaping. He followed every step of theirs in imagination, envying them bitterly. That they should be on their way to dear old England, and that he should be cut off! It was too terrible—too awful—too cruel.
He had no sleep that night; and he could not see the pitying angels who hovered over him. He could not know what was going on in another part of the fortress, or guess how some of his comrades won their freedom.
All the next morning he lay on the ground, listless, hopeless, careless of what might happen next.
At mid-day he was ordered to go down into the yard. That was the hour when the subterranean prisoners retired into their dungeon, and when the better class of prisoners might take their turn of fresh air—if any air could be fresh, which had just been breathed by hundreds of men. Roy wondered languidly at being treated thus. He had expected to remain in his cell. It mattered little either way, he said to himself, as he found his way thither. All hope for the present was at an end.
On reaching the yard, his first impression was of an unusual gravity, among even the gravest of the prisoners there before him. One or two of them half spoke to Roy, and stopped, thinking from his look that he already knew, that he would not be taken by surprise; and so he was allowed to pass on, unhindered. He saw the expression in their faces, and he wondered a little, indifferently.
Then indifference fled, and a dazed bewilderment took possession of him. His brain swam, and he staggered to the wall, clutching it for support, staring and shuddering.
His eyes had fallen on something unexpected, on—what was it? What could it mean?
A row of boys, lying on the ground, peacefully asleep. Ah, so peacefully! so awfully white and still, in their brave blue uniforms; some of them spattered with blood. But they did not seem to mind. A smile was on one quiet face: and another had a look of high repose; and one or two carried a defiant frown, as if at the last moment they had known what was come to them; and another was a little grieved, but not much. And all were free. They had won their liberty, though not the liberty for which they had craved and striven, but, it might well be, a better freedom. Only, the poor mothers of those lads, away at home—what would they have thought to see their boys lying here?[1]