GARDE’S ORDEAL.
HOW to get the keys into Adam’s possession, now that she had them in her
own, was the first question that presented itself to the mind of Garde.
Her ruse at her uncle’s had been so quickly and easily planned and
executed that she had almost fancied Adam freed already. Yet as she
hastened homeward, filled with conflicting emotions of excitement, grief
and despair, she soon comprehended that her task had not as yet really
begun.
Could she only ascertain in what portion of the prison the rover was
incarcerated, she thought it might be possible to convey him the keys
through the window, provided he had one in his cell. Thinking of this,
she naturally remembered the jailer’s wife, a poor ailing creature, who
lived in the building, with her husband, and to whom Goody Dune had
ministered, times without number, frequently sending Garde with simples
to relieve her of multitudinous aches and pains. This was her cue. She
could take her some of the herbs of which a plentiful stock had been
collected in the Donner household, for the use of her grandfather.
Fortunately David Donner had so far progressed, if not toward recovery,
then at least toward change, that he slept for hours, like a weary
child, waking after dreamless slumber all pink and prattling. He was
thus asleep when she came to the house. She was therefore soon on her
way to the prison, her simples in a small basket, hung on her arm.
The hour was unusual for any one thus to be visiting the jailer’s wife,
so that the good woman, when Garde came in, after knocking, was
obviously surprised at the honor.
“Oh, Mrs. Weaver,” said the girl, hurriedly, “I heard you had been
having trouble here to-day, and I knew how it always upsets you, and
Goody had given me all these simples to bring, three days ago, so I
thought I had better bring them to you the moment I knew you were being
so worried.”
It was a fact that the jailer’s wife was invariably very much distressed
when guests were thrust upon their hospitality. She always feared at
first that they would get away, and afterward that they would not, as
her abhorrence and then her sympathy came respectively into play. She
also conjectured all manner of terrible things that might at any moment
happen to Blessedness Weaver, her worthy husband. To-night she was
particularly nervous, owing to the sudden increase in the jail’s
population and the blood-freezing details and rumors afloat as to the
nature of the company assembled under the roof of the building.
“Dear me, lassie,” she said, in answer to Garde’s well-chosen speech,
“do come in directly. I am that fidgety and poorly, the night! Lauk,
lassie, but you are a dear, thoughtful heart, and I shall never forget
you for this. And we have such terrible gentlemen, the night!”
She always called the guests gentlemen, till she found out which way lay
the sympathies of a given visitor, when they all became rogues,
forthwith, if she found herself encouraged to this violent language.
Later on, again, when her sympathies for their plight were aroused, they
were restored to their former social appellations.
“Oh, I am so sorry for you!” said Garde. “I had heard of one prisoner;
but could you have had more than one?”
“Lauk, yes,” said the woman rolling her eyes heavenward. “They took the
principal rogue in the woods, I believe, but they captured his two
brutal companions at the Crow and Arrow in the afternoon.”
This was news to Garde. She recognized the beef-eaters from this vivid
description. If Adam had his friends at his side, he must be much more
contented, and they would all be planning to escape.
“And so all three are under lock and key, safely together?” she said,
innocently. “How fortunate!”
“Oh dear me, no,” corrected Mrs. Weaver. “The two taken by daylight are
together in the southern exposure, while the last one was thrust in the
dungeon. Oh Lauk, Mistress, but he is a terrible man!”
Garde felt her heart sink, even though it never ceased for a moment to
beat so hard that it pained her. Adam in a dungeon! How in the world
could she ever manage to get the keys to him now? Dungeons, she knew,
were under the ground; they were dank, death-dealing places, with moldy
straw in one corner and with slimy rocks for walls. She could have cried
in her sudden wretchedness of spirit, although it could never mean
anything to her, whether Adam lived or died, in prison or out. However,
she mastered herself splendidly.
“A dungeon?” she said. “Oh, I didn’t know you had a dungeon here. It
must be very deep down in the earth.”
“It’s a creepy place; oh lauk, it’s that creepy!” said the woman. “But
it’s not so deep, dearie. It’s nine steps down. I’ve counted the steps
many’s the time. But it is where we puts the monstrously wicked rogues,
such as this bloodthirsty man! And it’s that dark, my dear—oh lauk, what
a place to spend the night!”
“Of course it must be dark,” said Garde, suppressing her eagerness.
“They couldn’t have a window in such a place as that.”
“Indeed we have, though; we’ve a window in every room in the place,”
corrected the jailer’s wife, with commendable pride in the architectural
arrangements. “Oh yes, it has its window, no bigger than my hand,
lassie, and slanting up through the rock, but it’s a rare little light
it lets in to the poor gentlemen down below!”
“I’m glad he—the prisoners here have some light,” said Garde, honestly,
“but I don’t see where such a window could be.”
“It’s on the dark side of the house, night and day the same,” explained
Mrs. Weaver. “It’s around on the dark side, where no one would find it
in a month of Sundays, just about the length of my foot above the
ground. Such a small thing it is, and the light it lets in is that
little! Oh lauk, I’m feeling worse to be thinking upon it!”
“Then you mustn’t talk about it any more,” Garde assured her,
sympathetically. “And I must be going home. I do hope the simples will
make you better, and I’m so glad I came. I must say good night, for I
suppose you will all be going to bed very soon.”
“I shall be there directly,” Mrs. Weaver informed her, “but dear me,
Blessedness won’t be touching a pillow for an hour, and then he’ll sleep
with his stockings on. He always does the first night with new rogues in
the house. Good night, dearie, and God bless you for a sweet child.”
Garde went out and walked slowly toward Grandther Donner’s. She had an
hour to wear away, for she would not dare to be searching about the jail
before the jailer at least retired to his couch.
The time was one of dread and chills. Her teeth chattered, not from any
suggestion of cold in the night air, but from the nervous strain of this
time of suspense. She had never been so frightened of any action in her
life, as she was when at length she crept back to the prison, through
the dark, deserted streets, and began to search about to find the tiny
window of which Mrs. Weaver had spoken.
There were two dark sides to the building. One was constantly in the
shadow of a tavern, which almost abutted against it, while the other was
on the northern face of the building, in a narrow street. Garde went
first to the northern exposure, for in order to get at the other shaded
side, she would have been obliged to climb a low, brick wall.
Scarcely had she more than come to her destination, and begun her
feverish search, before she heard the sound of distant footsteps, which
rapidly approached. She crouched in a black little niche, in fear, with
a violent commotion in her breast which threatened to drop her down in a
swoon. Almost stepping on her toes, some pedestrian passed, leaving the
girl so horribly weak that she shut her eyes and leaned against the
wall, laboring to get her breath.
Nerved again by the things Mrs. Weaver had told her, she came out of her
hiding-place, after several minutes, and feeling the cold rock-wall she
passed eagerly along, shaking with her chill and fearing to breathe too
loud, in the silence.
She was doomed here to bitter disappointment. The window was not to be
found. She searched again and again, unwilling to give it up, but it was
not there. She realized that she must climb the brick barrier, and try
on the other side of the building.
She found the wall not difficult to surmount, but when she jumped down,
on the further side, she struck on a heap of broken crockery, thrown out
from the tavern.
She crouched down instantly, for the noise she had made attracted the
notice of some one in the public house. A door at the rear of the
hostelry was thrown open and a man looked out. He appeared to be looking
straight at her and listening.
“Must have been a cat,” he said, to somebody back in the house, and he
disappeared and closed the door.
Garde could not have been any more wrought upon than the whole affair
had made her already. She could not become calm. She could merely wait
for moments of partial relief from overwhelming emotions.
Thus in time she was creeping along again, feeling the dark stone as
before and peering vainly and desperately into the shadows which lay so
densely upon the whole enclosure. Hastily she traversed the whole length
of the wall. She arrived at the far end, ready to sink down and cry in
anguish. She had not discovered the window.
Back again she went, choking back hysterical sobs and bruising her
delicate hands on the rough rocks, as she played with her fingers along
that grim, dark pile. She failed again.
Sitting where she was, in the grass, which was growing rank in the
place, she clasped her hands in despair. She would have to give it up.
There was some mistake. There was no window.
Yet once more she would try. She could not give it up. The dungeon’s
horrors and the terrible character of Edward Randolph made her fear that
if the morning came before Adam was free, he would no longer have need
for freedom, nor light.
Slowly, this time, and digging at the base of the stone-wall that rose
above her, she felt down to the very roots of the grass, for the
aperture which represented a window. To her unspeakable joy, her fingers
suddenly ran into an absolute hole in the solid rock, in a matted growth
of roots and grass, which had grown up about it!
She sank down, momentarily overcome with this discovery. It was too much
to believe. She felt she was almost dying, so insupportable was the
agitation of her heart. But she presently clutched at the grass and tore
it away in a mad fever of haste. She dug, with her fingers and her
finger nails. She could smell the odor of the bruised grass, and then
the wholesome fragrance of earth. She had soon uncovered a small square
opening, no larger, as the jailer’s wife had said, than a good-sized
hand.
On her knees as she was, she bent her head down to a level with the hole
and put her lips close to the opening. She tried to speak, but such a
faintness came upon her that she could not utter a sound. She had worked
with a tremendous resolution toward this end, and now the flood of
thoughts of everything said and done that evening, came upon her and
rendered her dumb, with emotion and dread.
Making a great effort she essayed to speak again. Once more she failed.
But she waited doggedly, for the power she knew would not desert her in
the end. Thus for the third time she mustered all her strength and
leaned down to the window.
“Adam,” she said, faintly, and then she waited, breathlessly.
There was no response. There was not a sound from that tomb, the
dankness of which she now began to detect in her nostrils.
“Adam!” she repeated, this time more strongly.
Some subterranean rustling then came to her ears.
“Adam! Oh, Adam!” she said, in a voice that trembled uncontrollably.
“Who’s that? Who’s speaking? Is it you, John Rosella?” came in a rumble
from the dungeon.
She failed to recognize his voice, so altered did the passage from his
place of imprisonment make it.
“Oh, is that you, Adam—Mr. Rust?” she asked, trembling violently.
“Garde!” he said, joyously. “Garde! Oh, my darling! Yes, it’s I. Where
are you? What have you done?”
Garde felt her strength leave her treacherously. Thus to hear the
endearing names leap upward to her from that terrible place was too much
to bear, after all she had learned.
“Here—here are the keys,” she whispered down to him, haltingly. “And
your friends—your two companions—they are also in the prison. I hope—I
hope you can find your way out. I am dropping them down—the keys. Here
they come.” She tossed the bunch, which she had taken from her pocket
with nerveless fingers, and now she heard the metallic clink, as they
struck the floor, come faintly up through the aperture.
Adam was starting to say something. She dared not wait to listen. Now
that her task was done, she knew she would absolutely collapse, if she
did not at once bestir herself to flee.
“I mustn’t stop!” she said to him, a little wildly. “Be careful.
Good-by,” and without even waiting to hear him answer, she arose, thrust
a bunch of grass back into place over the opening, and hastened away.
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