United States or Svalbard and Jan Mayen ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
But his courage and patience never failed him. Through all that weary time he was always planning and watching for a chance to escape. At last it came. Deceived by his apparent indifference his jailers permitted him to ride, and even to hunt with them, but always under a careful watch. One day, however, the hunt grew so exciting that everyone forgot Gustavus and rode hard and fast after the game.
When I have seen him, it has always been in the train of others. 'I thought as much. Doubtless he goes abroad well guarded. His companions, Levi, I doubt are little better than jailers? Levi opened his eyes, but it was to no purpose; they can see no other thing clearly, save a Persian coin. I found, upon further inquiry, that it was even as I had supposed and had heard.
The guards who had been assigned to Henry professedly as a mark of honor, and to add to the splendor of his establishment, were in reality his jailers, who watched him with an eagle eye. They were all zealous Papists, and most of them, in the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, had dipped their hands deep in Protestant blood.
Terrible were the brutalised jailers, whose occupation is to torment their brothers, and who were certain that they were fulfilling an important and useful duty; but most terrible of all seemed this sickly, elderly, kind-hearted inspector, who was obliged to part mother and son, father and daughter, who were just the same sort of people as he and his own children. "What is it all for?"
But though his imprisonment was not so severe, nor his prison quite so narrow and wretched as some word-painters have described them, during the greater part of the time his condition was a dreary and painful one, especially when spent, as it sometimes was, "under cruel and oppressive jailers."
He proposed a closer and a more rigorous survey of his cell, so that he might discover the mode by which his tormentor entered, were it as unnoticeable as an auger-hole. If his diligence should prove unavailing, he determined to inform the jailers, to whom it could not be indifferent to know, that their prison was open to such intrusions.
Then at length he and the notary departed, and, the jailers having cleared away the food and locked the door, Castell and Peter lay down on the beds that they had made ready for them, thankful enough to find themselves at Seville, even though in a prison, where indeed they slept very well that night.
They were half-starved, bullied, browbeaten, and even beaten by their jailers, they were threatened with death as spies though there was not an atom of evidence against them and, finally, after many months of anguish, of short commons, of brutal treatment, they found themselves interned in Ruhleben race-course, to which so many unfortunate civilians were sent, there to mope and fret and rot while the war was in progress.
About nine o'clock on the following morning one of the jailers came to summon Margaret and her father to be led before the court. Margaret asked anxiously if the Senor Brome was coming too, but the man replied that he knew nothing of the Senor Brome, as he was in one of the cells for dangerous criminals, which he did not serve.
There was now the wild desire to escape from her rescuer and to fly back to the kindly jailers on the hill. "A poor priest, by the grace of God," he said, and she heard him chuckle. "Take me back to the road, sir!" she commanded. "I will take you to your mother," he said, "and to no one else." "But I am afraid of you," she exclaimed, her courage going.
Word Of The Day