There was to be a moon that night, and the thickets were black at
sunset against the cold yellow of a winter sky. Frost hung in the air,
with a gusty, arid northeast wind that came sweeping south with a sense
of coming snow, while great purple cloudbanks loomed slowly into the
north. The grass was already stiffening, and the leaves made a dry thin
rattle as John Gore drew up in the beech-thicket over against Thorn. He
had brought an extra cloak with him, and a loin-cloth for his horse, and
after some searching he found a little hollow where dead bracken stood,
and where the beast would be sheltered from the wind. He buckled the
bridle about a young ash whose black buds and branches stood out against
the sky.
John Gore took his sword, pistols, and tools into Thorn with him that
night, tying them up in the end of a red scarf, and swinging them after
him as he straddled the gate. He hid the sword and one pistol in the ivy
at the foot of the tower, and set out on a reconnoissance, holding close
under the deep shadow of the walls, and keeping a long knife ready in
case the dog should be loose and on the prowl. There was a faint silvery
glow low down in the eastern sky, but no moon as yet, and John Gore,
meeting the keen north wind, thought of Barbara in that cold room, and
felt his heart warm to her, and to Mrs. Winnie as he remembered the
blazing kitchen at Furze Farm.
Probing about in the dusk, he found the doorway that led into the ruined
hall, and in the corner of the hall the rough stone stair and door that
gave access to the tower. It might have seemed simpler to have set to
work straightway upon that door, but he chose the safer, slower method
of forcing the window and then working from within.
The rope was dangling from within reach when John Gore returned to the
foot of the tower, and he went up it hand over hand with the tools slung
behind him by the scarf. He was soon under Barbara’s window, where the
rope ran taut over the sill, and, reaching in for a grip of the bars, he
called to her in a whisper.
“I am here, John, waiting.”
He felt the wind on his back, and guessed how miserably cold that room
must be.
“Poor heart, the blood must be numb in you.”
“No, John, not quite.”
“Let me have your hands, dear.”
He lay in on the window-ledge with his face against the bars, and
stretched his arms in. His hands groped for hers and found them, and of
a truth they were like ice.
“Why, my life, you are all a-shiver!”
She was shuddering a little—half with the cold, half with a deep thrill
from within.
“No, it is not only the cold, John.”
“No?”
“It is all so strange—and hazardous.”
He held her hands between his, and then began to chafe them to get them
warm.
“We will soon have you out of this. I have found a warm nest for you,
where they pile the wood half-way up the chimney, and look glum if one
does not eat more than one needs. You must rest there, Barbe, and forget
everything for a while, and let the past die, dear, if you can. I
suppose the folk below will not meddle to-night?”
“No. Yet it is strange, John, they have brought me no food to-day.”
“No food, child! Why?”
“Oh, I had a little bread left.”
“The brutes! And here am I chattering like a starling instead of getting
to work.”
He drew up the scarf, and unfastening the knot about the tools and
pistol, laid them before him on the sill. Then he made a loop in the
rope, so that the end should not be left dangling near the ground and
betray him in case the man Pinniger were in a vigilant mood. He had
brought a rag with a slip of lard in it, and he greased the bar with the
fat where the file was to work, so that the tool should make less sound.
The steady “burr” of the steel teeth soon told of their bite upon the
rusty metal. The three bars were as thick as John Gore’s forefinger, but
they had rusted away more at the lower ends, where the damp gathered and
the rain had stood in tiny pools. A strong arm would be able to thrust
them in after an hour or so’s steady filing.
Barbara stood on the bed, leaning her arms against the wall and
listening to the stubborn rasping of the file. There was a sweetness
even in that rough, shrill sound to her, for life and desire were
breaking in with strong arms and the beat of a man’s heart. She no
longer felt the cold, but stood there conscious only of the dearness and
mystery of it all, letting a sense of infinite peace steal in. She fell
almost into a dreamy, wandering mood like one near to the edge of sleep,
hearing him speak to her from time to time. Now and again he would stop
and rest, and stretch a hand in between the bars, and she felt him once
take a strand of her hair and lay it across his lips.
John Gore had filed through one bar and bent it back, when a sudden,
clear, ringing sound came up to them out of the silence of the tower,
like the clash of something metallic upon stone. Barbara woke from her
stupor of dreams like a frightened sentinel, and put up a hand as though
in warning.
“John! Did you hear that?”
He had heard it, and hung there with every sense upon the alert, hating
the wind that made the ivy rustle. Barbara had stepped down from the bed
and crossed the room to the door. She knelt and laid her ear to the
lock, holding her breath, her lips parted, her eyes at gaze.
A vague suggestion of movement came to her from the dark well of the
tower stair—a dull, slow, scraping sound that came up and up with
moments of silence in between. There was no glimmer of light as she
looked through the key-hole, nothing but that slow, cautious sound like
some big thing crawling in a dark and narrow place.
Shivering, her skin a-prickle as with cold, she went back to the window,
climbed the bed, and gave the man a whisper.
“John, there is some one coming up the stair.”
“Lie down on the bed, child; I will slip out and wait.”
She heard the rope chafe slightly against the window-ledge as John Gore
lowered himself cautiously so as to be out of view. He hung there as a
sailor can, with feet and knees gripping the rope, and one hand on the
butt of the pistol that he had thrust into his belt. He had left the
tools on the window-sill, and no one would see them or the knotted rope
about the bar, unless they climbed up from the bed to look.
Hanging there, with the wind shaking the ivy, he could hear no sound in
the tower and see no glimmer of light coming from the squints. The
rising moon was beginning to throw gleams down into the valley, but the
western quarter of the tower was as dark as a well. It was a moment when
a man may feel scared by some vague, indefinite peril invisible to him
in the darkness. Or he may clinch his teeth and keep his right hand
ready, knowing, if he be a man who has had his share of
adventure-hunting, that his own imagination may be far more sinister
than any living thing on earth or sea.
There was a sudden faint click like the twist of a turned lock, a sound
that made John Gore lift his chin heavenward and listen with both his
ears. Then came a slow whine, as though an unoiled hinge were turning.
The door of Barbara’s room had been opened; he had no doubt of that.
Probably she was feigning sleep, thinking that one of my lord’s
creatures had come to see that all was safe. A harsh gust of wind shook
the ivy on the wall, making John Gore curse the leaves for setting up
such a flutter.
But above the rustling of the ivy he heard an abrupt and half-smothered
cry, and then the sound as of people struggling. The bed creaked; there
was an inarticulate choking as of some one striving to call for help
through the smothering folds of a cloak. The black room within seemed
full of movement, of piteous effort, of hoarse, savage whisperings that
made his mane bristle like a furious dog’s.
He gave one shout as a challenge and a warning, and then slid down the
rope without heeding how it chafed his hands. Plucking out his sword and
pistol from the ivy at the foot of the tower, he ran for the doorway
that led from the terrace into the hall, his face meeting the moonlight
that poured down through a broken window.