Seating himself upon it he cupped his chin in his hands and began afresh to contemplate his hopeless situation. After a few moments a faint sound from the far corner of the cell caught his attention. A second later he jumped to his feet and cowered back against the wall. He could not see them but he knew that there were rats there, perhaps swarms of them; and he had heard stories of the feet of living prisoners, in just such circumstances as he now found himself, being gnawed away by packs of rodents made desperate by hunger.
Roger was no coward. Before he reached the age of twenty he had challenged, fought and killed one of the finest swordsmen in all France; with a weapon in his hands he was prepared, if need be, to prove his metal against heavy odds; but the thought of his clothes and flesh being torn from him in small pieces by scores of sharp little teeth utterly unnerved him. The sweat of terror broke out upon his face and he began to shout for help with all the power of his lungs.
No answer came to his frantic cries, and after a while, he fell silent. The sounds from the corner of the cell told him that there was a number of rats there, but they came no nearer. Gradually calmness returned to him, and with the perspiration now cold upon his forehead, he sat down again.
For some time his mind was too numb with misery for him to think coherently; then he remembered that in one thing at least he had been granted a reprieve; he had not so far been searched.
Taking the papers from his inner pocket he fumbled among them in the darkness, until, by his sense of touch he had decided which of them must be the laisser-passer. He then got out his tinder-box, and with some difficulty succeeded in igniting it. When at last the paper burst into a flame, he heaved a sigh of relief. At least he had succeeded in destroying one damning piece of evidence against him.
Yet, as he looked up he cowered back again. The flame was reflected in the corner of the cell by a galaxy of little starlike lights, the eyes of the rats who were watching him, and there could not be less than a score of them.
When he had recovered from that unnerving turn he took from his pocket the Swedish Order. Since it was his first decoration, and a great honour for so young a man, he was most loath to part with it, but he knew that it would cost him his life if it was found upon him. The sodden straw was a good six inches deep, since one layer had been thrown down upon another and it seemed improbable that the cell had been cleaned out for years. Digging the toe of his boot into the" soggy mess, he scooped a hole until he reached the floor, laid the much prized jewel and ribbon on the exposed stone, and trampled the decaying straw well down over it.
He heaved another sigh; partly of regret but partly also of relief. He had enjoyed the possession of it for barely forty-eight hours, but it could not now convict him of being in league with Russia's enemies; since it was most unlikely that it would be found for months to come, and, even if it were, no proof could be brought that it was he who had hidden it there.
With a little gleam of humour it occurred to him how admirable it would be if only he could lay Count Yagerhorn's ghost as easily as he had disposed of the other two more material objects which had threatened to bring him to an untimely grave.
There remained, too, Orlof's letter; but, lacking a knife or scissors, he knew that it would be extremely difficult to get it from its hiding-place, and influenced partly by the unlikelihood of its being discovered there and partly by his belief in its immense potential value, he decided not to attempt its destruction.
Puzzle his wits as he would he could not even hazard a theory as to how the Count had met his death. It could not possibly have been a heart-attack, as had he been liable to such a seizure it would have taken him while he was being flogged into insensibility. It could not have been suffocation either, since he distinctly recalled giving Zaria implicit instructions to ease the Count's gag if that became necessary; and he did not believe for an instant that Zaria would have failed to carry out his orders. The flogging with a riding switch across the head and shoulders could not possibly have been the cause of his death, seeing that he had survived for the best part of three hours afterwards.
At length Roger gave up the riddle and his thoughts drifted to the strange fate which had carried him so far from home. He thought of his dear, wicked Georgina, and wondered if she had returned yet to her beloved Stillwaters or was somewhere in the distant Mediterranean, travelling with her father. He thought, too, of his sweet-faced mother with her circumscribed yet active existence, bounded by her charities and her Hampshire garden; and of his father, that rampaging, forthright, jolly sea-dog of an Admiral. His small but stately home in Lymington was in fact several thousand miles away, but in mental distance it seemed a million.
Roger began to feel very tired, but he knew that he dared not sleep. As long as he kept awake the rats would keep their distance, but if he once allowed himself to drop off, the foul creatures would sneak up and begin to nibble at his extremities. .
Now and again he stood up and, for a little, paced the narrow cell to keep himself awake and warm; yet, despite these periods of exercise, towards morning the deathly chill of the place began to make him shiver.
Time stood still. It was a place of eternal night where months might pass without its occupant ever being aware that the sun he once had known had passed across the sky. The stomach of the prisoner was his only clock, and but for the lack of craving in his, Roger would have thought that several days had passed, before at last, he caught faint footfalls coming down the corridor.
The footfalls grew louder; they halted, and the heavy door grated open. By the dim light of a lantern Roger saw the head-gaoler and another. The senior called to him and he stumbled from his cell. They took him through endless vaulted corridors again, up several flights of stone steps to the blessed daylight once more, and showed him into a room where an oldish man, dressed in a handsome uniform, was seated behind a desk.
To Roger's amazement this obviously important person not only offered him a chair, but proceeded to apologise to him for the unpleasant hours that he had passed since his arrival. Apparently, unless special instructions were received to the contrary, all new prisoners were put in one of the lower dungeons for their first night, in order that they might form some impression of what a month of such confinement would be like; and thus be persuaded of the folly of bringing such a penalty upon themselves by attempting to escape.
The elderly officer introduced himself as Colonel Tschevaridef; then told Roger with bluff heartiness that he was very pleased to see him, would endeavour to make him as comfortable as possible, and hoped that his stay in the fortress would be a long one. So did Roger, providing it was not in the dungeon—as even a lengthy imprisonment seemed better than the short shrift he had been envisaging for himself since four o'clock the previous afternoon—but all the same he thought the greeting a little queer.
However, it soon emerged that the old soldier was the Governor of the fortress, and he admitted quite frankly that the amount of his income depended on the number and quality of the prisoners in his keeping. He received so much a day for each and the higher their rank the higher the rate he was paid. He was responsible for feeding them out of the money, and the more he got for them the better they fared. Roger, ranking as a Major-General, would be classed as of the second grade, at two roubles a day, 'and feed almost as well as if he were eating at the Governor's table. The Colonel concluded this reference to his organisation by remarking that he prided himself on giving all grades of his prisoners better fare than was the case in other fortresses, and that when Roger was released he would be doing both him and any friend of his who might be a prisoner elsewhere a good service by urging them to use such influence as they might have to get themselves transferred to Schlusselburg.