Slowly and carefully he thrust out one foot and drew the other to it, feeling with his hands the while, till they came in contact with a wall that was roughly plastered.

That was something tangible; and gradually feeling his way along this he came to an angle in the wall, starting off in another direction.

This he traced, and at the end of a few paces came to another angle.

Then again another, and in the next side of what was a stone-floored, nearly square apartment, he felt a door.

There was the way out, then. The door was not panelled, but of slant bevelled boards, crossed by strong iron hinges, and--yes--here was the keyhole; but on bending down and looking through, he could feel a cold draught of air, but see no light.

"There must be a window," he thought; and to find this he searched the place again as high as he could reach, but without avail; and at last he found his way back to the heap of straw, and threw himself down in disgust.

"Well, I sha'n't bother," he muttered. "I'm shut up here just as if I was in prison. I've been to sleep, and I've woke up in the dark, because it's night; and that's about the worst of it. I don't see anything to mind. There's no watch to keep, so I sha'n't be roused up by that precious bell; and as every sailor ought to get a good long sleep whenever he can, why here goes."

Perhaps Hilary Leigh's thoughts were not quite so doughty as his words; but whatever his thoughts were, he fought them down in the most manful way, stretched himself out upon the straw, and after lying thinking for a few minutes he dropped off fast asleep, breathing as regularly and easily as if he had been on board the _Kestrel_, and rocked in the cradle of the deep.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

A MORE PLEASANT AWAKENING, WITH A HUNGRY FIT.

"Tchu weet--tchu weet--tchu weet! Come to tea, Jack! Come to tea, Jack! Come to tea, Jack! Whips Kitty! Whips Kitty! Whips Kitty!

Tcho-tcho-tcho!"

Hilary Leigh lay half awake, listening to the loud song of a thrush, full-throated and joyous, whistling away to his mate sitting close by in her clay cup of a nest upon four pale greenish-blue spotted eggs; and as he heard the notes he seemed to be in the old bedroom at Sir Henry Norland's, where he used to leave his window open to be called by the birds.

Yes, he was back in the old place, and here was the rich, ruddy, golden light of the sun streaming in at his window, and through on to the opposite wall; and it was such a beautiful morning that he would jump up and take his rod, and go down to the big hole in the river. The tench would bite like fun on a morning like this. There were plenty of big worms, too, in the old watering-pot, tough as worms should be after a good scouring in a heap of wet moss. Just another five minutes and he'd get up, and when he met Adela at breakfast he could brag about what a good one he was at early rising, and show her all the beautiful tench, and--

"Hallo! Am I awake?"

There was no mistake about it. He was wide awake now, and it was years ago that he used to listen to the birds in his old bedroom at Sir Henry Norland's; and though a thrush was whistling away outside, and the rising sun was streaming in at a window and shining on the opposite wall, where he was now Hilary Leigh did not know, only that he was seated on a heap of straw, and that he was in what looked like a part of an old-fashioned chapel, with a window high up above his reach.

"I feel as if I had been asleep for about a week," muttered Hilary, "and I'm so hungry that if they, whoever they are, don't soon bring me some breakfast I shall eat my boots."

"Why, they must have carried me in here while I was asleep," he thought; and then, "Hallo, old fellow!" he cried, laughing, "there you are, are you?"

For just then, completely eclipsing the thrush in power, a donkey-- probably, he thought, the one that brought him there--trumpeted forth his own resonant song, the song that made the savage Irishman exclaim that it was "a wonderful bird for singing, only it seemed to have a moighty cowld." And if there had been any doubt before what donkey it was, Hilary's mind was set at rest, for as the bray ended in a long-drawn minor howl there came two or three sharp raps, just as if the jacka.s.s has relieved his feelings with these good kicks, as was the case, up against the boards of the shed in which he was confined.

"Well, this is a rum set-out," said Hilary, getting up, and then bending down to have a rub at his legs, which still suffered from the compression of the cord. "Hang it all! what a mess my uniform is in with this chaffy straw!"

He set to and brushed off as much as he could, and then began to inspect the place in which he was imprisoned, to find that the ideas he had formed of it in the dark were not far wrong, inasmuch as there was a plastered wall, a stone floor, an ancient-looking door with a big keyhole, through which he could see nothing, and the Gothic window with iron bars across, and no gla.s.s to keep out the air.

"Well, if any fellow had told me about this I should have said he was inventing. I suppose I'm a prisoner. I wonder what Lips...o...b.. thinks of my not coming back. Well, I can't help it; and he must come with some of our men to cut me out."

"Come to tea, Jack! Come to tea, Jack! Whips Kitty! Whips Kitty!

Whips Kitty!"

"Yes, I'll come to tea," said Hilary, as the thrush sang on; "but how am I to come? Oh! I say, I am so precious hungry. I could eat the hardest biscuit and the toughest bit of salt beef that ever a fellow put between his teeth. They might bring me some prog."

Hilary was well rested by his sleep, and felt as active as a young goat now, so running to the door he tried it again, to find it shut fast, and no chance of getting it open. So he turned at once to the window, and looked around for something to enable him to reach it, but looked in vain, for there was nothing to be seen.

"Never mind; here goes!" he cried; and walking back to the opposite wall he took a run and a jump, and succeeded in getting his hands upon the old stone sill, but only to slip back again.

He repeated his efforts several times, but in vain; and at last finding this was hopeless, unless for the time being he had been furnished with the hind-legs of a kangaroo, he took out his pocket-knife, opened it, and began to cut a notch in the wall.

It was the soft sandstone of the district, and he was not long in carving a good resting-place for one foot; and this he followed up, cutting another niche about a foot higher.

"I'm making a pretty mess," he muttered as he looked down; "serve 'em right for shutting me up."

On he went carving away with the big jack-knife, which was an offering made by Billy Waters, and his perseverance was at last rewarded by his contriving a series of niches in the stone wall by whose means he climbed up sufficiently high to enable him to reach the iron bars, when he easily drew himself up to the broad sill, upon which he could sit, and with one arm through the bars, make himself pretty comfortable and enjoy the view.

His first glance, though, was at the iron bars embedded in the stone, and he came to the conclusion that, given enough time, he could pick away the cement and make his escape; but as it would be a matter of time he thought that perhaps it would be better to defer it until he knew where he was.

"Looking due east," said Hilary, as he began taking observations; "then the sea must be to the right, over those hills; and out here to the left--my word, what a pretty place! Why, it is like a park!"

For gazing to the left, or northward, his eye ranged over the lovely undulating Suss.e.x Weald, with its park-like, well-wooded hills and valleys, now in the first blush of their summer beauty, the leaf.a.ge all tender green, and the soft meadowlike pastures gilded with the dazzling yellow of the over-abundant crowfoot.

There was a thick dew upon the gra.s.s, which sparkled like myriads of diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires in the morning sun. Here was a patch of vivid blue where the wild hyacinths were peering out from the edge of a wood which, farther in, was tinted with the delicate French-white of the anemones; the cuckoo-flowers rose with their pale lavender turrets of bloom above the hedgeside herbage, and the rich purple of the spotted orchis was on every side.

There was a cottage here, a mossy-roofed barn there, all green and yellow; and a tile roofed and sided farmhouse peered from an apple orchard all pink blossoms farther on; and dotted about were the patches like pinky snow lying thick amongst the trees, telling of golden and ruddy russet apples in the days to come.

Here and there the land dipped down sharply into woody ravines, from out of whose depths there were reflected back the brilliant flashes of the sun where the little streamlets trickled down towards one that was broader, and opened out into quite a little lake, with a h.o.a.ry-looking building at one end, where something seemed to be in motion, and, making a telescope of his hands, he could just discern that it was a great wheel, from which the water was falling in splashes that glistened and sparkled in the sun. Far away the hills seemed of a pale misty blue, near at hand they were of a golden green, and as he drank in with his eyes the beauty of the scene beneath the brilliant blue sky Hilary Leigh exclaimed:

"Oh! how I could enjoy all this, if I were not so jolly hungry!"

He forgot his hunger the next moment, for he caught sight of a couple of tiny white tails seeming to run up a sandy bank, their owners, a pair of brown rabbits, making for their holes as if ashamed of having been seen by daylight after eating tender herbage all the night. Far above them the bird that gave its name to the cutter was hovering in the air, seemingly motionless at times, as it poised itself over something that tried to hide itself in the gra.s.s.

The proceedings of the kestrel interested Hilary to no small extent as he saw it stoop, rise, hover again, and end by making a dash down like an arrow, and then skim along the ground and fly away without its prey.

"Like our dash after the smugglers," he said to himself; and then he looked closer home, to see that where he was formed part of a very ancient house, one of whose mossy-roofed, ivy-grown gables he could just make out by pressing his cheek very hard against the iron bars. Beside it was an orchard full of very old lichened trees, with patches of green moss about their boles, and beyond this there seemed to be a garden in a very neglected state, while surrounding all was a wide black moat.

"I wonder whether there's a bridge," thought Hilary, as he looked at the smooth dark water, dotted with the broad leaves of the yellow water-lily, and amidst the herbage of whose banks a sooty-looking water-hen was walking delicately upon its long thin green toes, darting its crimson-shielded head forward and flicking its white black-barred tail at every step.

"It's very nice to be growing a man," mused Hilary; "but how I could enjoy being a boy again! I'll be bound to say there's heaps of fish in that great moat, for it looks as deep as deep."

It was not above twenty yards from him at the nearest end, where it curved round the place that formed his prison, and from his elevated position he could command a good view.

"There, I said so!" he exclaimed; "I can see the lily leaves moving.

There's a big tench pushing about amongst the stems. Smack! That was a great carp."

The water moved in a series of rings in the spot whence the loud smacking noise had come, and as Hilary excitedly watched the place a faint nibbling noise reached his ear. After looking about he saw what produced the sound, in the shape of a pretty little animal, that seemed to be made of the softest and finest of black velvet. It had crawled a little way up a strand of reed, and was nibbling its way through so rapidly that the reed fell over with a light splash in the water, when the little animal followed, took the cut end in its teeth, and swam across the moat, trailing the reed, and disappearing with it under some overhanging bushes, where it probably had its hole.

"I could be as happy as a king here," thought Hilary, "if I could go about as I liked. Why, there's a snake crawling out in the sun on that patch of sand, and--phew! what a whopper! a ten-pounder, if he's an ounce!" he cried, as, simultaneously with the flashing out of a shoal of little silvery fish from the black surface of the moat there was a rush, a swirl, a tremendous splash, and the green and gold of a large pike was seen as it threw itself out of the water in pursuit of its prey.

"I wonder whether they've got any fishing-tackle here," he cried excitedly. "How I could enjoy a week or two at this place! Why, there'd be no end of fun, only one would want a companion. Birds' nests must swarm, and one might get rabbits and hares, and fish of an evening."

He stopped short, for an acute pang drew his attention to an extremely vulgar want.

"Oh, I say, what a boy I am still!" he said, half aloud. "Here I am, half starved for want of food. I'm a king's officer taken prisoner by a pack of dirty smugglers, and I'm keeping up my dignity as a gentleman in the king's service by thinking about chasing water-rats and fishing for carp and pike. 'Pon my word I'm about ashamed of myself. What a beautiful magpie, though!" he continued, staring out of the window; "I never saw one with so large a tail. Why, there are jays, too calling in the wood. Yes, there they go--char, char, char! One might keep 'em aboard ship to make fog-signals in thick weather. My word, how this does bring back all the old times! I feel as boyish and as bright and-- Oh! I say, are you going to starve a fellow to death? I can't stand this. Ahoy! Is there any one here? Ahoy! Pipe all hands to breakfast, will you? Ahoy!"