But his heart never felt so near his mouth before, nor his fingers so desperately tenacious, as when he had climbed some forty feet up that tower of Thorn. The ivy stems were smaller and gave less grip, while the sheer mass above him made the black void behind and below seem full of a sense of suction drawing him toward a smashing fall upon the terrace stones. He pressed his chest to the brickwork, breathing hard through dilated nostrils, his teeth set, and his hands clinched upon the cordage of the creeper.
His brain grew steadier anon, and he went on, slowly and grimly, like a mountaineer laboriously and patiently clinging to narrow niches in the rock. Another ten feet brought him to one of the windows. It was barred, but the bar gave him something to hold to, and he found a knotted stem beneath that jutted out like a corbel. He rested there awhile, listening, and he could hear a dull, rhythmic sound above, as though some one were pacing to and fro in an upper room.
Then he went on again, even more slowly and perilously than before, thinking what a mad fool he was, and trying to forget that the return journey was before him. He was so close to the window now, and so grimly intent on keeping his hold, that he had no instinct left in him but the instinct of self-preservation. His whole consciousness seemed in his fingers and his toes. At last he felt one hand go over the window-ledge, and, lifting himself slowly, he got a grip of the stanchions and drew himself up till he could rest his elbows on the sill.
He hung there dizzy and out of breath, yet with a sense of infinite comfort at having his hand upon an iron bar. His fingers were bleeding, and his stockings torn into holes at the toes. Life and the full memory of things came back to him as he lay on the sill of the window. It was no moment for elaborate curtesy, as though he were in a velvet coat and bowing himself gallantly on the threshold of a great lady’s salon.
One word came to him as the blood steadied in his brain, and he uttered it in a half whisper, as though it would have the power of a spell.
“Barbara!”
He heard some one move, and the creaking of woodwork.
“Barbara, is it you?”
There was a rustling sound against the wall, and two hands came up to him out of the darkness.
“John—John Gore?”