Alfgar followed passively. He could not help looking as if to take leave of his father; but Anlaf stood as mute and passionless as a statue. Sidroc reached a party of the guard, and bade them confine the prisoner in the dungeon beneath the ruined eastern tower.
"Listen to my last words, thou recreant boy; Sweyn will send for thee early in the morning before the assembled host; it will be the day of St. Brice; and even were he not now mad with rage, there would be no mercy for a Christian on that day. Thou must yield, or die by the severest torture, compared with which the death of thy late companion under the archers' shafts was merciful. Be warned!"
[CHAPTER XI]. THE GLEEMAN.
It was a low dungeon, built of that brick which we still recognise as of Roman manufacture, in the foundations of what had been the eastern tower of the ancient fortification. The old pile had been badly preserved by the Saxon conquerors, but it had been built of that solid architecture which seems almost to defy the assaults of time, and which in some cases, after fifteen centuries, preserves all its characteristics, and promises yet to preserve them, when our frailer erections lie crumbled in the dust.
The roof was semicircular, and composed of minute bricks, seeming to form one solid mass; the floor of tiling, arranged in patterns, which could still be obscurely traced by the light of the lamp left by the charity of Sidroc to the prisoner; for the dungeon was of bad reputation; lights had been seen there at unearthly hours, when the outer door was fast and no inmate existed.
There were two long narrow windows at the end, unbarred, for they were too small for the human body to pass through them; they looked upon the valley and, river beneath, for although the dungeon was below the level of the courtyard, it was above that of the neighbourhood.
The prisoner strode up and down the limited area, wrestling with self, bending the will by prayer to submit to ignominy and pain, for he knew now that his father had abandoned him, and that he had to apprehend the worst; still he did not regret the choice he had made, and he felt, as he prayed, peace and confidence descend like heavenly dew upon his soul. Mechanically he cast his eyes around the cell, and tried to trace out the pattern of the flooring, when he saw that the central figure, around which the circles and squares converged, was justice, with the scales, and the motto, "Fiat justitia." He knew the meaning of the words, for Father Cuthbert had taught him some Latin, and the conviction flashed upon him that, sooner or later, all the wrong and evil about him would be righted by the power of a judge as omnipotent as unerring. And this thought made him the more reconciled to the apparent injustice of which he was the victim, and he prayed for his father, that God would enlighten him with the true light.
"Perhaps before he dies he may yet think of me without shame."
For the shame which he unwillingly brought upon a father who was stern, yet not unkind or void of parental love, was the bitterest ingredient in the cup.
And so the hours rolled on, which brought the dreaded morn nearer and nearer; and the victim, comforted by prayer, but without hope in this world, slept, and thought no longer of the torturer's knife, or felt the cruel anticipations which would rack the waiting mind.