Soon I came under the grim walls, and, as if to greet me, a wandering ray of the moon came out and fell on the window above the hall-door. It even surprised me how little fear I felt as I now hauled myself up by the creepers and clambered on to the porch. But here my triumph reached its limit.
The window this time was closely barred. His honour had no doubt guessed how, on my former visits, I had found entrance, and had taken this means to thwart my next. No shaking or pulling was of any avail. Kilgorman, by that way at least, was unassailable.
Yet I was not to be thwarted all at once. My courage, I confess, was a little daunted as I clambered down to earth, and proceeded to feel my way carefully round the house for some more likely entry. But entry there was none. Every window and door was fast. The moonlight, which swept fitfully over the stagnant swamp, struck only on sullen, forbidding walls, and the breeze, now fast rising, moaned round the eaves to a tune which sent a shudder through my vitals.
My courage seemed to die away with it. But I determined to make one more round of the walls before I owned myself beaten. I tried the bar of every window. One after another they resisted stiffly, till suddenly I came on one (that below the room where I had found the strange relic of my mother months ago) which yielded a little in my hand, and seemed to invite me to test it again. The second time it gave more, and after a while, being eaten through with rust, it broke off.
The bars on either side of it proved equally yielding, and though some cost more trouble than others, I succeeded in about half-an-hour in breaking away sufficient to effect an entrance. The window behind the bars was easily forced, and once more I found myself standing inside Kilgorman.
It would be a lie to say that I felt no fears. Indeed every step I took along the dark passage helped to chill my blood, and long before I had reached the door of the great kitchen I wished myself safe outside again.
But shame, and the memory of that pathetic message from my dead mother, held me to my purpose. And, as if to encourage me, the candle stood where I had found it once before on the little ledge, and beside it, to my astonishment, a small crust of bread. It must have stood there a week, and was both stale and mouldy. But to my famishing taste it was a repast for a king, and put a little new courage into me.
It surprised me to find the great apartment once again crowded with arms, stacked all along the sides and laid in heaps on the centre of the floor. What perplexed me was not so much the arms themselves as the marvel how those that brought them entered and left the house.
But just now I had no time for such speculations. I was strung up to a certain duty, and that I must perform, and leave speculation for later. My mother’s letter, if it meant anything, meant that I was to seek for something below or behind the great hearth; and as I peered carefully round it with my candle I could not help recalling the ghost which Tim and I had both heard, years ago, advance to this very spot and there halt.
Save the deep recess of the fireplace itself, there was no sign above or below of any hiding-place. The flagstones at my feet were solid and firm, and the bricks on either side showed neither gap nor crack. I pushed the candle further in and stepped cautiously over the crumbled embers into the hollow of the deep grate itself.