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Had she given way to a kind of despair, as happened shortly before her final release for only a few moments indeed her jailers would not have neglected to record such weakness as a sign that her heavenly agencies had failed, if not forsaken her utterly.
The landscape before her, which was picturesque and richly wooded, consisted of the en-closed chase of Charolois; but her jailers had taken due care that her chamber should not command a view of the castle of Branchimont. The valley and all its moving life were indeed entirely shut out from her. Often the day vanished without a human being appearing in sight.
The girl was artful, indeed, and armed with that roll, I might have snapped my fingers at the jailers. In one hour, with that little file, I could have sawn through the thickest bar, and with the gold coin I could have exchanged my soldier's cloak for civilian garb at the nearest shop.
She managed to squeeze herself between two beams of wood placed across an opening in her prison, and was on the point of leaving her dungeon tower when one of the jailers caught sight of her, and she was retaken.
"Well, you need say no more. I will trouble you no further." Saying this, she rose and stood in all her stately beauty before them cold, haughty, and without a trace of emotion left. They were struck by the change. Thus far she had appeared a timid, agitated, frightened girl; they now saw in her something of that indomitable spirit which had already baffled and perplexed her jailers.
For I had an experience which has ever since given me to know the souls of prisoners. The first day, in spite of the cell's foulness, I laughed secretly at jailers and felt at peace, holding the world at bay. I did not then know that Ste. Pélagie was the tomb of the accused, where more than one prisoner dragged out years without learning why he was put there.
The continuation to the Grace Abounding, written by a friend, and published four years after his decease, divides his imprisonment into three periods; but as Bunyan makes it one continued imprisonment, there can be no doubt but that it was a long, dreary confinement; during which the testimony of his friend, Samuel Wilson, is, that it was 'an uncomfortable and close prison, and sometimes under cruel and oppressive jailers. The division into three parts most probably alludes to the severity or liberality of his jailers.
I rolled the piece of paper, stuck it on the edge of the sharp bayonette and putting the rifle on my shoulder, directed it towards the window. I felt when it was taken. Then I joined my fellow jailers. Today I saw a man who resembled strikingly the Tumen Russian of the profane language.
Here they toiled on the railway, clearing the land, bringing in wood from the jungle building roads, half starved and savagely ill-treated. They might burn with fever or waste their feeble strength in dysentery, it made no difference to their brutal jailers.
Vain, therefore, on this day were all my efforts to corrupt the jailers; and, in fact, anticipating a time when I might have occasion to corrupt some of them for a more important purpose and on a larger scale, I did not think it prudent to proclaim my character beforehand as one who tampered with such means, and thus to arm against myself those jealousies in official people, which it was so peculiarly important that I should keep asleep.
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