CHAPTER XIX

INTO THE FIRE

I opened the window and looked out into the night, glad to see the sky veiled in thick clouds which didn't let a single star through. For the darkness would befriend me better than the brightest moon. I said good-bye to Jenny, and climbed out on to the sill, and feeling for a firm branch of ivy carefully began to lower myself till my face was on a level with the window-ledge. There I paused to say a last farewell, and Jenny stooping swiftly caught my cheeks between her little hands and kissed me with a passionate vigour, saying, "You'll find him, Tommy?"

"And kill him," I answered, and recommenced the descent.

I reached the ground safely, and looking up heard a faint whisper, "Good-bye, Tommy; good-bye." But it was too dark to see my little friend; and I moved away, keeping close to the wall.

I hadn't gone many yards before I was arrested by the faintest sound of footsteps in front of me. Immediately my mind filled with thoughts of the officers. They were lurking there for me. I stood still and listened. I wasn't mistaken. The sound was repeated; stealthily, as though some one was creeping towards me through the darkness. Had I been heard too? I asked myself. I thought not, for I had taken every precaution, treading as softly as I knew how. But was it safest to retreat, or to wait where I was? For a moment or two I waited listening whether the steps would approach me or not. For a while I heard nothing, and thought they had ceased. Then close to me I heard a louder crunch on the path, and I realized that only a few paces separated me from this unknown prowler who I felt convinced was on my trail. The sudden proximity nerved me to action. I glided back on the way I had come, but a treacherous twig cracked beneath my heel with a report like a pistol. I stood petrified, straining eyes and ears for signs of my pursuer. But he seemed to have halted. The air was deathly still. I pressed on again, hugging the wall, and felt where it opened back into a low doorway. I crept into the crevice, and silently strained against the little door; but it was locked. Indeed, I didn't expect to find it otherwise, for I remembered it, and knew it was never used. I thought my best plan was to wait under the archway, where if it came to blows I could take my enemy by surprise.

I crouched into the darkness, listening for his approach. Still the silence remained unbroken, and my ears filled with that shrill singing which is only heard when the air is utterly still. The singing became so loud that I feared I wouldn't hear a sound if one came. Then I grew aware that the edge of my foot was resting on a pebble. I was terrified lest it should somehow shoot from beneath me and betray my hiding-place. But an inspiration came to me. Slowly I stooped down and took the pebble in my hand, then carefully threw it in front of me among the shrubbery that bordered the other side of the path. I thought my pursuer hearing it would turn and follow the sound. I heard it fall with a dull thud on the earth beyond the bushes. I had thrown too far. To give the rustling sound I intended it should have fallen in among the twigs.

However, I drew myself up silently and listened. I thought I could distinguish a faint movement. And it seemed that my pursuer was nearer than before. Would he step aside after the false trail? But another stir in the darkness told me he was still on my track.

I began to stoop for another pebble. I thought the manœuvre was worth a second trial. But as I stooped my arm touched something soft. My muscles stiffened, and my heart gave a bound, for I had touched a man. I dared not move; hardly dared breathe. I wanted to turn and look, but I couldn't control a nerve. Then I seemed to hear a deep slow breathing beside me. It was more a motion of the air than a sound. Summoning my utmost courage I turned my head. Very faintly in the blackness I could distinguish a sort of lesser dimness which I knew was a face. And I knew too that the eyes were fixed upon me. They seemed to be glowing at me, though nothing of them could I actually see. It was merely that I felt them there like a paralyzing spell.

Then suddenly my attention was diverted. Close to me on the other side I heard the faint fillip of a stone on the path. I was caught in the trap all right. I expected every moment to feel a hand grip me from one side or the other. But nothing happened, and the strain became intolerable. I wanted to scream aloud, to spring out from the archway and into the open. What were they waiting for? Why didn't that hidden spy in the corner give the signal? Why didn't my first pursuer put out a hand and feel for me? They seemed to be playing with me, a cruel sort of game. I was fairly trapped, but they wished to linger out the agony. A terrible sweat broke out on my brow; my tongue went dry; my throat was so parched I could scarcely breathe. And all the while I could feel as it were a heavy shadow palpably closing in from either side. Then suddenly I caught my breath and choked.

That broke the spell. I sprang away. I thought I felt a hand clutch me from behind as though to stop me; but before I had fled a couple of steps there was a splitting pain at my head as though something had burst within it; and before I lost consciousness I knew that some one had struck me a dizzying blow.

I awoke to a sort of disturbed dreaming long before I awoke to reality. There was a heavy confusion in my mind as though I were being swung at the end of a long chain. There was a rushing and buzzing in my ears, and sometimes a sudden cessation as though the whole world were frozen into a momentary immobility. Then with a wrench I was dizzily spinning again in a sickening circle. But by degrees the spinning seemed to slacken, and then I was tossing uneasily with short lurchings and swayings as though I were suspended from a high roof with a company of giants swinging me from one to another. For sometimes I was tearing through the air; and then I would stop with a thud and a jerk to be sent racing away once more. And always there was a sort of burdensome cloud weighing at my heart, strangely oppressing me with stifling fold upon fold of black vapour. And the cloud seemed to grow, till it enveloped my whole body; and the noise of the air rushing past me became muffled and far away, as though I were swathed in huge blankets of palpable clinging gloom. I struggled against it, and longed even for the sickening hiss of the air about my face, for something seemed to be sucking at my lungs so that I couldn't draw a mouthful of breath.

So tossed with such evil fancies I was gradually shaken back to consciousness, and at length knew that I was stiflingly gagged and bound, with something over my face shutting out the cool night air, if night it were, and making the world for me a wall of solid blackness. I knew also that I was being carried on somebody's back; and over very uneven country, I thought, for my body, not by any means recovered from its stiffness and soreness, was being jolted cruelly as my captor pushed on with thumping strides.

It was useless trying to struggle or to utter the least sound. I did make one frenzied effort; but though the blood seemed to be bursting at my veins I couldn't so much as twitch a muscle. I believe if I hadn't lapsed again into unconsciousness I should have gone mad, for there seemed to well up from the very depths of my being as it were a scream of frenzy heaving to be uttered but unable to burst free, and with a sense of convulsed suffocation I felt the darkness close about me again and my senses were mercifully sealed.

So with a wavering mist about me, which sometimes opened to let through a dim and filmy light, to darken again into an impenetrable gloom, I was borne on and on, interminably it seemed to my dazed mind. Then the jolting jog gave place to a smooth tranquillity, and a vague rhythmic grinding told me I was in a boat on the river. And later I felt a heaving and sinking, and knew I was on the sea.

The sea!

Perhaps it was the sudden realization that I was out upon the beloved sea that revived me; or perhaps it was merely that the stifling wrapper had been removed from my face, and I could breathe again in ease and comfort. I found too that my limbs were free, though still cruelly stiff. But with the discovery I sat up, for I had been lying down, and looked about me.

Little enough could I make out, for it was dark in the cabin, if cabin it were, and only from one side came a faint blur of lesser darkness. I half wondered whether it were early morning or late evening, for the past seemed so far away that a day might easily have slipped over. Also I realized that during the day, supposing a day to have gone by, the wind had risen, for it had been serenely calm when I had left Sunset Towers.

I rose, and treading cautiously for the ship was rolling and I was unsteady from my long dizziness and swooning, I made my way to the spot from where the dim light seemed to be coming. It had appeared a long way off, but suddenly I found myself upon it. It was a glazed window, and perpendicular shadows down it told me it was barred on the outside. I tried to gaze out upon the sea, but it was too dark for me to distinguish anything, except indeed the faintly luminous white of the water where the ship cut through. Yet the thought that I was at sea was exhilarating, and rapidly my nausea fell away, and I drew in deep breaths as though to fill my lungs with the delicious salt air, though in the cabin there was little but the smell of pitch and damp canvas and rotting cordage.

At a sudden thought I thrust my hand beneath my cloak. My weapons had both gone. But rummaging vaguely in my pockets I felt Jenny's guinea, and somehow the feel of it in my fingers gave me a sense of companionship and comfort.

Next I began to explore my prison, for I didn't dare hope it was anything else; nor did I begin to reason out yet what strange cause had brought me there. It was enough for the moment to take bearings of my surroundings. And it was soon done. For I was confined in a box rather than a cabin. There was a pile of damp canvas matting on which I had been lying, but otherwise there was nothing in the place at all; and it measured only three of my full paces either way. I felt for the door. The handle turned, but the door was firmly locked or bolted on the other side. I shook it, not vigorously, but merely to learn whether there were anyone on guard; and sure enough a harsh, deep voice from the outside advised me with an oath to keep quiet.

Then indeed I sat down on my pile of canvas and started to think. But with little result. I couldn't imagine what could have induced my captors to kidnap me in this way and take me out to sea. Indeed, I wondered now whether it was the officers after all who had caught me. Was there another on my track? My father's secret enemy, it might be. Perhaps now the persecution was to include me too. But who was that other one who had been hidden under the archway? What was his part in the drama? And then the memory of the paralysing fear I had felt told me it must have been the witch, Bite-in-the-Dark. I shuddered at the thought. Was it indeed she? I found no answer to all these questionings, but tossed them vainly about in my muddled mind till all was chaos and confusion. And after all, I told myself, it might be a mistake. I preferred to accept that solution, for it was the most consoling. And yet for the life of me I couldn't imagine any set of circumstances to account for such an error. So telling myself it was all a mistake which would soon be rectified, yet believing deep within me that the shadow of fear which had darkened my father's life was now closing about me too, I lay down and tried to sleep.

But the morning brought no comfort. I discovered that I was in some part of the deck-house. I could hear the carpenter at work close by, and the smell of sizzling pork told me that the galley wasn't far distant. There were voices too, but in spite of my knocking and shouting no one took the least heed of me. I peered out through the window which gave on to a strip of deck, pressing my face to the pane, waiting for some one to pass by. But no one came, and I fell back to my pallet disheartened.

Eventually a great rough fellow, the one I suspect who had growled at me outside the door, brought me a hunk of pork on a slab of bread and a tin of vile coffee. But to all my questioning he wouldn't answer a word except, "The skipper'll settle you all right; don't you fear."

Later in the day I demanded to see the skipper, and was told that the longer it was before I saw him the healthier it would be for me.

So I gazed through the little window growing more and more disconsolate, till even the swaying of the waves as they slid out from beneath the vessel and tossed their manes and curved away to the open waters failed to stir my ardour. The wonder became a grey monotony, which brought with it even an accustomed sickness; for as a rule I was a good sailor, and in other circumstances would have gloried in the swelling monsters which pushed up from under the vessel to drop her into a deep pool of overshadowing green. But now I felt strangely dizzy, and for a while lay rolling on the floor vomiting miserably; and it didn't seem to matter in the least whether the vessel and all within it should sink to the bottom of the sea.

So another night came, and another day, without change, except that I wasn't sick again, though the ship lurched more heavily and staggered uneasily forward as though a gale were rising. But with my captivity a dull and unusual brooding settled upon my spirit. I began to ask why fate had marked me out beyond all others for such unaccountable trials and reverses. I seemed to be the plaything of some brutal and implacable tyrant whose sport it was to dance me from adversity to adversity, tantalizing me by glimpses of desirable havens, but whisking me off and away again before I had time to fix my moorings. But mercifully I was still too young for such ideas to take deep root. The problems of evil and the destiny of man were beyond my scope of meditation.

However, during the days that passed so slowly and so wearily I thought much of my father and Worthing and Jenny. I had leisure to set many things in their right places in my mind, and arrange them in some sort of proportion and perspective. For instance, the picture of Worthing's sacrifice of honour for the sake of friendship grew like a visible thing before my eyes, till I bowed myself down and cried for the hurt my folly had done him. Then, too, I could see quite plainly now that I was deceiving Jenny inexcusably. She had sent me forth, having buckled on my armour as it were, to track down her father's foe. Believing in me as her champion she had hidden me and tended me all that day. She had put me in her own bed; she had bound up my wounds, and brought me food. And I had accepted her care as my due reward. I was masquerading, playing the hero, when all I wished was to escape from her and find my father. The thought didn't please me, but in compensation I told myself I would keep my word to her somehow, and put an end to that evil that was darkening her father's life.

But how? What clue had I? What clue did she think I had? Poor little Jenny! In her simplicity I supposed all she thought I had to do was to enquire of the first stranger and receive an answer to the riddle. Indeed the task seemed hopeless. I knew just nothing of the affair. Well, at least I would find my father. He might help me. At any rate he could teach me something of the technique of the sleuth. And meanwhile I wouldn't return to Jenny till I had accomplished something worthy of her trust in me.

So I watched and waited, settling my plans as though I were free and not a prisoner in the power of an unknown foe. I counted the days, in an agony lest the first of May should come and pass, and the ship not touch land, nor any prospect show itself of release from this unaccountable captivity.

The last day of April came, and with it a buffeting wind. Slowly the grey sky darkened towards evening. I made a frantic appeal to my jailer to take me to the captain, but the surly fellow glanced darkly at me without a word. I clutched him as he left the cabin, but he put out a great foot and sent me staggering across the floor to jolt against the partition and collapse half-winded.

There seemed no hope. In the evening an angry sun broke from the clouds and set full ahead. Languidly I told myself we were steering west. Then I threw myself across the floor, and with my face in my hands gave way to a fit of inconsolable weeping.