Plucking heart of grace, he moved on again, and soon the fancy became a certainty. It was the light of the sun now nearing the end of his course, and it was piercing the bars of a grating. From fluttering, Charles’s heart now stood still, for a great dismay seized him. What if that grating closed in the passage? Why, then, since he had noticed that there was no handle or mark of any kind at the back of the panel in the Cedar Room, he would not be able to open it, even if he dared to go back, and so he would be caught like a rat in a trap! It wanted some courage to go on and make certain, and only after a second or two he found it, and, groping his way on, reached the grating, to find that it was as he had thought so possible. The grating was just high and wide enough to allow of a person getting out of it. It stood on the top of a steep narrow flight of stone steps, and as Charles mounted these, the afternoon sunlight broke upon it from the outside, and he saw that it was chained and padlocked; but as he took hold of the padlock, it fell to pieces in his hand, all eaten through and through with rust. Then he saw that the links of the chain were equally useless, and as he gave the grating a push they all rattled and fell helplessly to the ground.
For a moment more the gate stuck hard, but with another tremendous push of Charles’s shoulder, it yielded with a screech, and swung back as far as a heap of mud and rotten leaves allowed it to go, and this was far enough to allow of Charles’s slender little body squeezing through.
When he got outside, he found himself—where? Ah! that was the puzzle of it. That he was beyond the moat of course he knew, but was he beyond the garden walls? If he was not—but he was, a good way beyond, right out in the fields; for though he was cooped up in a round sort of a bricked-in place like a well, and could see nothing but a close tangle of gorse and bramble overhead, he could hear the voices of the country folk, the neighing of horses, and the creaking of wagon-wheels hard by. And all at once as he listened the voices broke out in a loud cheery chorus. “Harvest Home,” sang the men, women, and children, while dogs barked, and the birds sang louder than ever:—
“Harvest Home!”
Merrily sing we all, “Harvest Home!”
And Charles knew that he was free.
CHAPTER IV
A NIGHT JOURNEY
As the wagon-wheels creaked nearer and nearer, and the singing of the merry-makers came past him, Charles had all the work in the world to keep himself from leaping up out of the hole to join them, they seemed so happy. He himself did not feel anything like so happy as he had expected. He could not have laughed in that light-hearted way as the children did, chasing each other in and out of the gorse-bushes so near the edge of the hole that he could have caught them by the ankles as they ran.