The Cardinal's Musketeer by Mary Imlay Taylor

THE room in which the prisoner was confined was a small one in the cellar of the Château de Nancay, and was strong enough to resist his greatest efforts to effect an escape. That had been his first thought, and, as soon as the bolts were shot and his guards departed, he devoted himself to an exhaustive but unprofitable examination of the place. He was provided with a rushlight, and was thus enabled to make his observations with comparative ease. However, a few moments sufficed to convince him that it was fruitless to look for a possible means of egress. There was but one door, that by which he had entered, and which was sufficiently secure to resist twenty men as well as one, unprovided as he was with any lever to force the bolts and bars; and the only window, situated too high for him to look out of, was two feet long by ten inches in height and barred. Through it an occasional gust of night air chilled the room and made the rushlight flicker. He noticed with some surprise -- and strange thoughts of mademoiselle's charity -- that there was only a bench in the cell, and that too short and narrow for a man to lie on. If he slept to-night it must be on the floor; and he was already almost overcome with physical exhaustion from his unremitting watchfulness.

A pitcher of water and a bowl of soup had been put upon the bench, and he ate the pottage with good appetite, for his fast had been almost unbroken since he left Amiens. He experienced a sensation of relief, at escaping the vigilance which had tormented him, and being secure of a few hours in which to rest without holding that hard ball between the roof of his mouth and his tongue. He wasted no further time in speculations as to the morrow; he ate his food and drank from his pitcher of water, and then, having hidden Père Matthieu's message as securely as he could in his clothing, he made a pillow of his cloak and stretched himself on the hard stone floor with a sigh of comfort. There is no sleep sweeter than that which comes to the weary, and he had earned a right to unbroken slumber. However, unconsciousness did not come so quickly as he had expected; he lay for a long while thinking of Mademoiselle de Nancay's manifest indifference to his fate, and the ease with which she consigned a political enemy to a comfortless dungeon. He could not reconcile this apparent cruelty with the kindness that had given him a token which, in all probability, had saved his life. He was visited, too, by other thoughts and with the recollection of Madame Michel's description of the manner in which he had been saved, when a helpless infant, from his father's enemy. He thought, too, of his visit, when a boy, to the château with Jacques des Horloges, of his prayer in his dead mother's room, of Renée and her bunch of violets on the terrace. As he lay there on the dungeon floor he fancied that he could hear the bell of the great jacquemart, which Michel regulated, ringing for eleven o'clock, and from that his mind went back to the chimes in the little shop on the Rue de la Ferronnerie and of his childhood and M. de Turenne. At this his thoughts trailed off into unconsciousness, and the exhausted musketeer slept the sleep of the tired and the innocent.