Through narrow, close-built streets, whose odours were decidedly unpleasant, we passed unmolested until we came into the shadow of the Castle rock. In the faint light of the stars it towered a sheer and beetling pile.
Dismounting, we tied the horses to a fence. Fitz took a dark lantern from his saddle; and among a miscellaneous collection of articles with which he had the forethought to provide himself, was a coil of rope. This it seemed was capable of adjustment into the form of a ladder; and our leader affirmed his intention of being the first man up the Castle wall. He proposed to affix this contrivance to the coping at the top in order that the others might climb up as easily and as expeditiously as possible.
There was nothing for it save to resign myself to stay with the two guides in the charge of the horses. It would have been a physical impossibility for a man bereft of the use of an arm to climb that sheer precipice.
Fitz's parting words of advice to me were characteristic.
"If," said he, "a sentry should come along, and want to know your business—I don't suppose he will, because they don't appear to have mounted a picket—knock out his brains at once, and make one of the guides put on his uniform and shoulder his gun and march up and down. So long, old son."
The Man of Destiny was gone, perhaps for ever. As each of my comrades in arms climbed over the low fence in his wake I wished him good luck. It seemed hardly a fighting chance that we should ever look on one another again.
They had left their cloaks behind, and these, together with my own, were thrown over the horses which had carried us so well. Tobacco is a great solace in seasons of tension, but the long-drawn suspense to which I had to submit soon became intolerable.
To a lover of the aurea mediocritas, a twentieth-century British paterfamilias confirmed in the comfortable security of a civil life, such a predicament was absurd. It was painful indeed to march hour after hour up and down the broken ground at the foot of the Castle rock. A pipe was in my teeth, otherwise I was signally exposed to the rigours of a long January night in Illyria. A bloody end was my perpetual contemplation. And I hardly dared to think what lay in store for my comrades, the faint hope of whose return it was my bounden duty to await.
There were moments in this season of poignant misery when I felt myself to be growing absolutely desperate. Why be ashamed to make the confession? The sensation of impotence was truly terrible. As the time passed and not a sound was to be heard, God alone knew what was being transacted in that frowning eyrie under the cover of the night.
Like most of those who have the unlucky leaven of imagination in their clay, my instinctive optimism is often on its trial. While I marched up and down in the darkness, trying vainly to keep warm, waiting for that tardy dawn in which death lurked for us all, I would have laid long odds that the doom of the Princess was sealed already and that my comrades in arms would share it.