He spoke with dogged obstinacy, but indeed after the evening’s adventures, and the cold awakening from that dream of gold which turned at the touch, there only remained to him the embers of hope and sullen persistency in carrying this project through to the end.
“Oh, well, then, of course if you come, I shall,” said Sep, in his little chirpy voice. “We’ll come, and come as long as you like, till we both find a fool’s grave down there.”
Rees did not answer. He was busy replacing the grating over the hole, and covering it up as before. Then they walked in silence, still suffering from a sort of lightness in the head, out into the open air, and climbed up to the spot on the wall where Sep had been drawn up. By the same means he was now let down again very silently, by the watery light of a moon that was battling not very successfully with the clouds. Then Rees walked out by the gate, as he could do without summoning Mrs. Crow, and rejoined the other two men under the castle wall.
Amos Goodhare was in a state of much excitement, and professed great enthusiasm over the devotion which each of the young men had displayed towards the other.
“It is such hazardous enterprises as these,” he said warmly, “which bring out in their brightest colors the qualities of young men.”
“Yes, and of older ones too,” assented Sep, in his best fool’s manner, which the librarian did not yet understand.
Goodhare heartily applauded Rees’s determination to go through with the adventure, but declined the offer that he should share the dangers of the next descent with a good-humored laugh.
“I am too old,” he said. “My limbs are too stiff for such doings. What would have become of me if I had been in the place of either of you? If in Sep Jocelyn’s, I should have been too heavy for you to lift; if in yours, I should not have been active enough to get him out in time. No, I must take the humbler part of watcher, and be content therefore with such share of the spoils—if there are to be any spoils—as you think due to my initiative.”
The younger men could not but agree with the justice of this reasoning, in whatever light they might consider these last words. They parted for the night very soon, Rees declaring that he had a plan, and that if Sep would be at the same place under the walls on the next evening but one, he would by that time, he thought, be in a position to perform the perilous adventure in safety.
On the evening appointed, therefore, Rees, without increasing the risk of exciting suspicion by meeting the other two men first, passed as usual through the castle gates and mounted to his place on the west wall. The weather was fine and mild, so that they had to wait their opportunity of escaping the eyes of such of the townsfolk as had strolled this way for a summer evening’s ramble. Sep’s seafaring experiences now stood him in good stead. As soon as Amos, on the watch a few yards below in the cricket meadow, gave the signal that no one was near, Sep seized the rope, which was almost hidden by the thick ivy, and was safe on the top of the wall in a few seconds.