An upper window in the tower shone out suddenly, a yellow oblong against the blackness of the ivied walls. The light remained steady. John Gore heard the sound of a rough, bullying voice that would have rasped any man’s fighting instinct and made him knit his muscles as though to take an enemy by the throat. For a moment there was silence. Then the voice came down to him again, harsh, threatening, with sharp, fierce words that sounded like oaths. Moreover, there was the sound as of a blow given, and then—shrill and full of strange anguish—a woman’s cry.
John Gore straightened where he stood, his upper lip stiffening and his teeth pressing grimly against each other. With the shadow of the thorn-tree over him, he stood there listening, the silence of the night about him, and from the lighted window high up in the tower a faint sound coming like the sound of some one weeping. A dull murmur of voices struck upon his ear. Then the light died away suddenly, the window melted into the darkness, and he heard the rough closing of a door. The light came down the stair again, flashing out where the squints opened, with a muffled thud of feet and the faint growl of voices.
But John Gore, as he stood under the thorn-tree, could still hear the sound as of weeping coming from the shadows of the great tower.
XXX
John Gore let his heart have its way that night, for the impulse in him was too strong to be withstood. Yet, like the cool and dogged man he was, he chastened the adventurous passion of a boy with the quiet hardihood of one who has learned to hold a rough ship’s company in awe of him.
Unbuckling his sword, he thrust it into the grass under the tree, for the thing would only have cumbered him, and after drawing off his heavy boots and coat he went quietly to the bridge and across it to the court-yard gate. As on the night when he had waited there with Mr. Pepys, he could see a light burning in a window near the ground and the shadow of some one moving in the room within. Taking a couple of steps back, he made a running jump at the gate, and got his hands on the top thereof with hardly a sound to convict him of clumsiness. The rest was easy, and he straddled the gate and then dropped softly into the court-yard. His chief fear was lest the dog should hear him and give tongue. But there was not so much as the rattle of a chain to show that the beast was on the alert.
Moving along the court-yard wall that edged the moat, he came to the terraceway that ran along the western front of the house. The place was smothered with weeds and brambles, the brambles catching his ankles like gins, so that he was constrained to go warily and set his teeth and his temper against the pricks. The wall fell to a couple of feet where the terrace began, giving a glimpse of the dim black waters of the moat.
John Gore halted when the outlines of the tower rose above him against the night sky. The western face thereof came down to the terrace stones, and in the western face was the window at which he had seen the hands appear. Crossing the terrace, he leaned against the plinth of the tower, almost burying himself in the ivy that hung there in masses. But for the very faint shivering of the leaves he could hear no sound, not even the sound of a voice from the far wing where the couple appeared to have their quarters.
John Gore ran his hands along the plinth, feeling for the main stems of the ivy where they had lifted and cocked the flagstones of the terrace. These stems were stout and tough as a great ship’s cable, forked here and there so that a man’s foot might rest, and sending out a net-work of ropes over the tower. John Gore thought of Sparkin, and how he would have laid a hatful of gold on the boy’s pluck and sinew for such a climb. But since there was no Sparkin to venture such a climb for him, he pulled his stockings up, took a look at the precipice overhead, and staked his neck on a scramble into the dark.
A rat would have thought nothing of such a climb, for you may find them nesting high up in the ivy about a house. A daring boy might have ventured it by daylight, but to scale such a place at night might have made the most monkeyish seaman swear that he was not yet tired of the taverns. John Gore was not a man who had trained as a sea-captain by drinking wine in his state-room and strutting in scarlet upon his quarter-deck. He could make the tops as briskly as any man in his ship’s company, and carry tarry hands and shiny clothes to the credit of his seamanship.