"Ho, there, Gregory, Adrian; what's amiss with ye?"
Still silence, mocking and implacable. The lull held for the moment; then the storm gathered.
"Break down the gate," roared the voice; "by God, we will see the bottom of this damned silence."
The Lord Flavian of Avalon had stood listening with the look of a man cooped in a cavern, who hears the sea surging to his feet. He glanced at the dead guards, and went white. To save his soul from purgatory it behoved him to act, and to act quickly. A single lamp still burnt in the oratory of hope. He went near to the girl on the dais, and held up the crossed hilt of his sword.
"By the Holy Cross, mercy!"
She cast a frightened glance into his eyes, and continued mute a moment. The thunder grew against the gate, the crash of steel, a rending din that went echoing into all the pits and passage-ways of the place. Fulviac's men had dragged the trunk of a fallen pine up the causeway, and were charging the gate till the timber groaned.
The man, with his sword held like a crucifix, stood and pleaded with his eyes.
"Mercy!" he said; "you know this warren and can save me."
"Are you a craven?"
"Craven? before God, no, only desperate. What hope have I unharnessed, one sword against fifty?"