“I wish to say nothing, except that I am entirely innocent.”
Then they hurried him back to his cell.
He had a hazy recollection of a brief incarceration in the Toulon convict prison, after which came the long voyage to La Nouvelle, and the settlement into the dull, hopeless existence he was now leading—a life so terrible that more than once he longed for death instead.
Sitting there that evening, he was thinking of his wife, refusing even then to believe that she had willingly held aloof from him. He felt confident that by some unfortunate freak of fate she had been unaware of his arrest, and might still be searching for him in vain. Perhaps the letters he wrote to her to the hotel and to Coombe might never have been posted. If they had not, there was now no chance of sending a message home, for one of the rules observed most strictly in the penal colony is that letters from convicts to their friends are forbidden. The unfortunate ones are completely isolated from the world. The families of French prisoners sent out to the Pacific Islands can obtain news of them at the Bureau of Prisons in Paris, but nowhere else. When convicts are handed over to the governor of the colony, their names are not given; they are known henceforth by numbers only.
Convict number 3098 knew that it was useless to hope any longer, yet it was almost incredible, he told himself, that he, an innocent man and an English subject, should be sent there to a living tomb for an offence that he did not commit—for the murder of a person whose name he had never before heard.
“I wonder where Valérie is now?” he said aloud, giving vent to a long-drawn sigh. “I wonder whether she ever thinks about me? Perhaps she does; perhaps she is wearing her heart out scouring every continental city in a futile endeavour to find me; perhaps—perhaps she’ll think I’m dead, and after a year or two of mourning marry some one else.”
He uttered the words in a low voice, more marked by suffering than by resignation. He preferred the companionship of his own thoughts, sad as they were; his mind always turned to Valérie, to the sad ruin of all his hopes.
“And Jack Egerton,” he continued, resting his chin upon his hands; “he must know, too, that I have disappeared. Will he seek me? Yet, what’s the use of hoping—trusting in the impossible—no one would dream of finding me in a French convict prison. No,” he added bitterly, “I must abandon hope, which at best is but a phantom pursued by eager fools. I must cast aside all thought of returning to civilisation, to home—to Valérie. I’ve seen her—seen her for the last time! No, it can’t be that we shall ever meet—that I shall ever set eyes again upon the woman who is more to me than life itself!”
He paused. In his ears there seemed to ring a little peal of Valérie’s silvery laughter, which mocked the chill, dead despair that had buried itself so deeply in his heart.
The tears sprang to his eyes, but he wiped them away with a brusque movement, and looked about abstractedly. The sun had set behind the crags, and had been succeeded by the soft tropical twilight. A faint breeze was abroad. The sough of the leaves above was lost in the gurgling of the mountain torrent as it rushed over its rocky bed. The palms, played upon by the wind, made a sound of their own. It was silence in the midst of sound, and sound in the midst of silence—majestic, contradictory, although natural.