When I came to a consciousness of myself again, the first thing of
which I laid hold with my mind as a means whereby to pull my
recollections back to my former cognisance of matters was a broad
shaft of sunlight streaming in through the west window of the prison
in Jamestown. And all this sunbeam was horribly barred like the body
of a wasp by the iron grating of the window, and had a fierce sting
of heat in it, for it was warm though only May, and I was in a high
fever by reason of my wounds. And another thing which served to hale
me back to acquaintance with my fixed estate of life was a great
swarm of flies which had entered at that same window, and were
grievously tormenting me, and I was too weak to disperse them. All
my wounds were dressed and bandaged and I was laid comfortably
enough upon a pallet, but I was all alone except for the flies which
settled upon me blackly with such an insistence of buzzing that that
minor grievance seemed verily the greatest in the world, and for the
time all else was forgot.
For some little time I did not think of Mary Cavendish, so hedged
about was I as to my freedom of thought and love by my physical
ills, for verily after a man has been out of consciousness with a
wound, it is his body which first struggles back to existence, and
his heart and soul have to follow as they may.
So I lay there knowing naught except the weary pain of my wounds,
and that sense of stiffness which forbade me to move, and the
fretful heat of that fierce west sunbeam, and the buzzing swarm of
flies, for some little time before the memory of it all came to me.
Then indeed, though with great pain, I raised myself upon my elbow,
and peered about my cell, and called aloud for some one to come,
thinking some one must be within hearing, for the sounds of life
were all about me: the tramp of horses on the road outside, the even
fall of a workman's hammer, the sweet husky carol of a slave's song,
and the laughter of children at play.
So I shouted and waited and shouted again, and no one came. There
was in my cell not much beside my pallet, except a little stand
which looked like one from Drake Hill, and on the stand was a china
dish like one which I had often seen at Drake Hill, with some mess
therein, what, I knew not, and a bottle of wine and some medicine
vials and glasses. I was not ironed, and, indeed, there was no need
of that, since I could not have moved.