Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/20

 12 Forty-one hours! There was not air enough to last me ten! I felt round the door; it was all but air proof. If I could make them hear! It was impossible; the house was the other side of a noisy courtyard—I must die! And Victorine! No, no,—ten thousand times no! I must live—I will live.

I bethought me of my old store of knowledge. How long could I live without fresh air? How many hours had I in which to reach it? I paced the length and breadth of the room—I measured its height, and found that by breathing only twenty times a minute I might live for thirteen hours; that would be till six o’clock on Sunday morning; and after that I must have air—air was life. I must bore through the walls, the lock was impregnable. The walls of brick would yield to tools. Tools! mockery! I had but a penknife—a toy—and I had thirteen hours to get through a wall at least two feet thick. It was a work of years, not hours. Tools! A long pointed bar and a hammer. I remembered to have seen a mason boring through a wall at my fathers with such tools. My penknife was two inches long. The gas-burner! I tried it; it was soft brass, my knife cut it readily. It might work through beside the gas-pipe. The man surely bored a larger hole than the pipe would fill. I felt the pipe where it went round the wall, and then pricked the wall with my knife; the cement with which the hole had been filled round the pipe was harder than the wall itself.

In tracing my way round the room my hand touched the gate. I was saved! I never felt such a sensation as when my hand touched that gate. It was rapture! bliss! I had despaired—I was now full of hope. I passed my hand carefully over the gate; I felt one of the bars, they were of round iron, about three-quarters of an inch in thickness, and after running through the framework of the gate were pointed at the end. But to get them out of that framework! I pulled one. It yielded a little, and then mocked at my efforts. I must have a hammer. I felt carefully round the walls again. The shelves were all let into the walls—there was nothing! I felt again, and close to the gate the shelf had been cut away to allow the gate to roll back, and the shelves were supported on brackets. If those brackets were wrought-iron I was helpless—cast-iron might save me yet. I felt them carefully and compared them; if they were wrought, they would be unlike in some points—if cast, alike in all. I knew now what the touch of the blind must be, so full of instruction to the mind.

They were cast-iron, not a trace of difference could be found. One more sign and I was certain; if cast, they would be cast in a mould, and there would be a slight roughness in the casting where the halves of the mould had been joined. I felt again. There was the roughness—the same in both. And now to break them off. A blow, a heavy blow, alone could do it. I remembered to have noticed, when putting away the books, a small chest of apparently solid iron on one of the shelves. I sought for it and found it; it was heavy, nearly the fourth of an hundredweight I thought. I poised it carefully, and felt I had strength enough to throw it with an aim. I cleared away the books from the slate shelf which rested on one of these brackets, and then measuring carefully the distance, threw the chest on to it. It fell short, and crashed on the floor.

Once more I tried, and this time successfully. The missile smashed the shelf into pieces. I kicked and beat away the smaller fragments till the bracket stood out from the wall by itself. And now came the test of my skill. If I threw once at the bracket in that black darkness, I threw twenty times or more; at last, one fortunately-directed blow, and I had the joy of hearing it ring on the pavement of the room.

I had now a hammer—awkward it is true; still a tool that would give a blow with a certain force.

I struck again and again at the bars of the gate, they yielded as the other had done and then were fast. I sank down exhausted with my useless efforts. Why did they not yield? I could give no more force to the blow—to throw the chest at them would be useless; the size would spread the blow over two or three of the bars, and the force would be lost. I must cut through one of the bars in the middle and thus wrench out the half I needed. How had I seen men cut through iron? With files—I could not hope for these. I remembered to have heard of prisoners who cut through iron bars with a watch springwatch-spring [sic]—by what horrible fatality was my watch at that moment in the case on my dressing-table. A watch-spring—a thin piece of steel. Would iron do? It might. In almost less time than it takes to tell, I had broken up one of the sheet-iron deed boxes, and by carefully bending a piece of it backwards and forwards on the sharp edge of the chest I had used as a missile, I obtained a strip about the length of my hand, and two fingers broad, and with this I commenced sawing one of the bars. Half an hour’s hard work produced no impression on the bar, and had turned up the edge of the soft sheet-iron on both sides.

If it had been a question of saws, I could have turned ten deed boxes into a hundred saws to cut through that one bar. Alas! it was no such thing, the saw would not cut; and then sprung up before me the vision of a large yard with blocks of stone and the motion to and fro of the suspended saw of the stone sawyer, and his little trickling water barrel and heap of sand. Once more I went to work. I broke off a corner of one of the stone shelves (the lower ones were of stone the upper of slate), pounded it fine with my hammer, and then wetting the edge of the saw with saliva, I strewed the pounded stone upon it. I felt the saw become steadier and steadier, and at last I could feel with my nail a little nick in the bar. I worked for nearly three hours at this one bar, changing my saw when it was worn hollow for another and another till I had worn out six of them. I was nearly through—another half hour, and I should be quite through; yet it might break off now with a blow—it might—and it might leave a ragged end to my chisel that would destroy half the force of my blows when I came to bore through the wall; I would not strike, but kept on patiently, and at last the saw went