Seized by an uncontrollable impulse, Ralph hastily doffed his armour, and, clad only in the soft leathern dress which knights wore beneath their harness, dropped into the stream so quietly as to be unperceived by the nearest sentry on the river-bank.
Starting from a well-known old pollard willow, Ralph breasted the stream manfully, making, as nearly as the sweep of the current and the darkness of the night would allow him, for certain iron stanchions which he remembered he had fixed, when a boy, into the castle wall.
To his great joy he found they had not been removed. He caught hold of the lowest, which was near the water's edge, and quickly scaled the wall. When he reached the top he looked eagerly down and around.
No one was near. William de Breauté, whose garrison was but scanty, had judged that no attack would be made upon the river side of the castle, except by boat, and accordingly had contented himself with posting sentries at each end of the long river-wall, concentrating his principal strength on the landward side of the castle.
Ralph slid down the other side of the wall, and cautiously crossed the open space which separated him from the huge mound on which stood the keep. He was still unperceived; so, climbing the steep side of the mound, he crouched down against the lofty wall, immediately beneath the lighted window.
Were those two figures still there?
Twice he softly called Aliva by name, and then, to his intense rapture, sweet as an angel's voice from heaven to him, came the words from above,--
"Ralph! Ralph! can it be thou?"
"Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage."
Love laughs at locksmiths. In this case it made light, too, of some forty perpendicular feet of massive stone wall. After five weary months of uncertainty, all doubts, mistrusts, and tortures of anxiety were swept away in a breath, as these two heard, each one once more, the loved voice neither had expected ever to hear again; and old Father Ouse, rippling sluggishly on between the willows through the dark summer night, had never listened to warmer raptures, to more passionate protestations of love.