XXXVI
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.