But there was no response; and when the sound of the iron had ceased to vibrate, and, it seemed to her, had exhausted itself in the air, nothing was heard but the monotonous dashing of the waves which came to die at the foot of the wall; and nothing more disturbed the silence of the night.
“Deaf as the pity in their souls!” she said after some moments.
And this time she knocked without flinching; for already Margaret had recovered from her fears. But a long and mournful silence continued to reign.
Whilst she was trying so ineffectually to reach her father, Sir Thomas re-entered the Tower, exhausted by fatigue. He had been confined in a still more gloomy and narrow cell. A miserable lamp, high placed, dimly lighted the obscurity. He was seated in a corner, and, alone at least, he went over in his mind the agonies he had endured
in that fatal journey. “Where is my daughter now?” he said to himself. “Alas! I saw her but an instant going out from before the judges. She will have seen that axe turned toward me. She will have said to herself there is no more hope; that I was branded with the seal of the condemned; that what she had heard was indeed true. If only she had returned to Chelsea! For they will not permit me to linger: Cromwell’s eyes gleamed with a ferocious light. Yet what have I done to this man to make him hate me so intensely? My God, permit me not to be betrayed into an emotion of hatred against” (Sir Thomas hesitated)—“against my brother,” he continued with courage; “for, after all, he is a man like myself, formed in the same mould, animated by the same intelligence; and it is better to be persecuted than to be the persecutor. Pardon him, then, O my God! Let your mercy be extended toward him, surround him on all sides, and never remember against him the evil he has wrought on me.”
While reflecting thus Sir Thomas suddenly heard a slight noise. He paused, and, seized with inexpressible anxiety, listened almost without breathing.
“It was in such manner he walked! It is he! It is Rochester!” he cried. “But no, I am mistaken; that cannot be,” he said, casting his eyes around him. “They have changed my cell; alas! I could not hear him even should he be there. It is an error of my troubled imagination.”
But the noise increased, and Sir Thomas soon heard them opening the doors which led to his cell. Some one was approaching.
“Again!” he said. “They will not, then, allow me a moment of
repose.” And he saw Sir Thomas Pope coming in, bearing a roll of paper in his right hand.