It was daylight when Burgo next opened his eyes, and asked himself what had happened to him and where he was. He tried to satisfy himself on the latter point first, because not to have done so would have involved an effort of memory such as just then he scarcely felt equal to. So without attempting to move hand or foot, he proceeded to stare about him, his eyes wandering from side to side, and taking in one detail after another of the unfamiliar quarters in which he now found himself.
Imprimis, he was stretched at full length on a couch which he afterwards found to be made of mahogany, with old-fashioned cushions and a pillow of horsehair considerably the worse for wear. The only other furniture comprised a small octagonal table, and a couple of straight-backed chairs of unpolished oak, apparently of some antiquity. Stay, though; in one corner was placed a common washstand and toilet service, such as in middle-class households are reserved for servants\' cubicles. The room itself was neither very large nor very lofty, but it was undeniably bare-looking, walls and ceiling being alike washed a dull creamy white. The room was lighted by one long, narrow window, with leaded lozenge-shaped panes of thick greenish glass, but placed so high up in the wall that a man had need to be full six feet high for his eyes to be on a level with its lowest panes. As the room had but one window, so it had but one door, which, like the table and the chairs, seemed to be of substantial oak.
But although he had satisfied himself as to the kind of place in which he was, that did not help him to solve the question of where he was. His ears were filled with a long, low, murmurous wash, which now struck his consciousness for the first time. He at once recognised it for what it was. "It is the noise of the incoming tide," he said to himself. "And this place? Is it--can it be that I have been brought to the Wizard\'s Tower?"
Everything was clear to him now, without any mental groping backward, up to the moment when he was struck down as he stood by the edge of the plantation. He had been the object of a foul and cowardly attack, and it was not difficult to guess to whose instigation he owed it. More than ever did he realise at that moment with how resolute and unscrupulous an antagonist he had to deal.
But why was he lying there? At once he sprang to his feet, but as he did so an involuntary "Ah!" escaped him, and the same instant he clapped both his hands to the back of his head. He had not known till then that he was wounded. But with the change in his position the pain made itself sharply felt, and presently his fingers informed him that the hair round the wound had been cut away, and the place itself covered with strips of sticking-plaster. To such an extent had he been tended and cared for. Just then, however, his wound was a matter of quite secondary importance. Having, as he believed, rightly guessed to what place he had been conveyed while unconscious, the all-important question at once put itself to him: "Am I a prisoner?"
His heart foreboded the answer but too surely. He crossed to the door and turned the handle. It was enough.
While he stood staring at the door like a man half dazed, he noticed that in the upper half of it there was a panel, about a couple of feet square, which looked as if it were movable, and on trying it with his hand he found that it slid back in a groove, leaving an aperture of its own size, of which Burgo at once proceeded to avail himself as a peep-hole. But what he could discern through it scarcely repaid him for his trouble--merely another space of whitewashed wall, as it might be that of a landing, with the two topmost steps of a flight of stone stairs leading to unknown regions below. Then it struck Burgo that the aperture might perchance be available for another purpose. Putting one arm through it up to the shoulder he proceeded to search for the bolt or key which held him prisoner, but neither one nor the other could he find. Whoever had locked him in had been careful to remove the key. Well, he had hardly expected anything else.
He now bethought himself to look at his watch. It was close on seven o\'clock. It had been somewhere about ten o\'clock when he was struck down, so that his unconsciousness had lasted for nearly nine hours. No wonder that his head smarted as it did.
It was not till later, when he had ample leisure for thinking things over, that there seemed to come over him a sort of dim consciousness that in the course of the night something had been given him to swallow, and that in his ears there had been a faint, confused murmur of voices, as of people talking a long way off; but it had all been so vague and unreal that he could never feel sure it was aught but a dream.
Having pushed the sliding panel back into its place, he crossed to the window, and found that, after stretching himself to his fullest height, his eyes were just on a level with the lowermost panes. It was evident that by standing on a chair his range of vision would be considerably enlarged, and that was what he at once proceeded to do. As he had quite expected it would, the window looked directly on the sea, and on nothing else. Whichever way he turned his eyes not a strip of land was visible. He could no longer doubt that he was shut up in the Wizard\'s Tower. Now that he had, as it were, explored his tiny domain, he sat down to think, but as yet his brain was so crowded with impressions, all more or less vivid, which involved the putting of so many more or less unanswerable questions, that to attempt to evolve therefrom any definite and consistent line of thought was for the present an impossibility.
Not long had he sat before his attention was caught by a faint grating noise, as it might be the turning of a rusty key, which was presently followed by the sound of shuffling footsteps ascending the stone stairs from below. Then the sliding panel was thrust back, and, framed by the aperture, Burgo beheld the yellow, wrinkled visage of a very old and very unprepossessing female, who stood for some seconds, gazing at him with weak and watery eyes, before she spoke.
"If you please, sir, I\'ve brought you your breakfus," she said at length in a thin quavering treble, "so, m\'appen you\'ll please to take the things as I hands \'em to you."
Burgo crossed to the door, and from the tray the old lady had brought with her, which she had placed on the floor before opening the slide, she handed to him, one by one, the various concomitants of a fairly good and substantial breakfast.
"And now, mother, if you will tell me what place this is, I shall be much obliged to you," said Burgo, as, last of all, he took from her hand a small coffee-pot.
The old woman favoured him with what to most people would have seemed a cunning leer, but which she may have intended for an amiable grin. "I can tell by the motion of your lips as you\'re a-talking to me," she piped; "but I couldn\'t hear a word you say, no, not even if you shouted ever so. I\'ve been stone deaf for the last dozen years. I\'ll fetch the breakfus things away when I brings your dinner." And, with a parting nod, she shut the slide and shuffled her way downstairs. Then came a muffled sound, as it might be the shutting of a heavy door, followed by the same grating noise as before.
Burgo was hungry, and was glad to be able to stay his appetite. He had a few cigarettes left in his case, and it may be that he enjoyed smoking a couple of them after breakfast none the less because his fortunes just then were at such a desperate pass. It was over his second cigarette that he came to the sensible conclusion to no longer badger his brains with a lot of vain surmises and questions which he had no means of answering, but rather to await the course of events quietly, and with such philosophy as he could summon to his aid. Any other course would be both futile and unmanly. Lady Clinton had got him into her power, and for the present he could but submit to that which it was out of his power to help.
In pursuance of this more cheerful way of looking at things he presently stretched himself on the sofa, and before long was fortunate enough to forget all his anxieties in sleep.
It was noon when he awoke. After a stare round he rose and shook himself. "I\'m neither a Monte Cristo nor a Jack Sheppard," he said, "but I may as well satisfy myself whether there is or............